till III llll II""' 



ENTMmj 



Class 
Book 




Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 
SOME UNINVITED MESSAGES 



By the Same Author 



OUR BENEVOLENT FEUDALISM 
MASS AND CLASS 



Socialism and 

SUCCESS^oo* 

SOME UNINVITED MESSAGES 



By 

W. J. Ghent 



NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMX 



Copyright, 1910, by 
John Lane Company 






PUBLISHERS PRINTING COMPANY NEW YORK 



©CI.A273639 



PREFACE 

A considerable part of the substance of 
the following pages has been published in 
periodicals. But excepting the " Retainers " 
chapter and the greater part of the "Re- 
formers" chapter, the essays have been 
entirely recast and rewritten. Acknowl- 
edgment is due Success and The Independ- 
ent for permission to reprint parts of "To 
the Seekers of Success"; to The Independ- 
ent for permission to reprint "To the Re- 
tainers," and to the Journal of the Amer- 
ican Social Science Association (1907) for 
like permission regarding the main part 
of " To the Reformers." " To Some Social- 
ists" is rewritten from a number of con- 
troversial articles that have appeared in 
[5] 



PREFACE 

The Worker (New York) and the New York 
Daily Call The basis of "To Mr. John 
Smith, Workingman," is a pamphlet printed 
and circulated by the Socialist party o^ 
New York City some four years ago. " To 
the Skeptics and Doubters" has not before 
been printed. 

W. J. G. 

New York City, September 28, 1910. 



[6] 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. To the Seekers of Success ... 9 
II. To the Reformers 45 

III. To the Retainers 96 

IV. To Some Socialists 129 

V. To Mr. John Smith, Workingman . .177 

VI. To the Skeptics and Doubters . . 207 



[7] 



SOCIALISM 
AND SUCCESS 

CHAPTER I 

TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

You hunt and strive for success. You 
that are religious pray for it, and you that 
are unreligious woo it and entreat it with 
a devotion that transcends the fervency of 
prayer. The teachers instruct you, the 
editors urge you, even the preachers exhort 
you, to go forward and win. They tell 
you not only that you should win, but that 
you can win. They tell you that no matter 
how fierce the strife, no matter what ob- 
stacles front you, no matter how many 
suitors throng the gates, you can, through 
courage and persistence and fortitude and 

[9] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

abstinence and thrift, attain the goal. 
Some of them tell you that you can attain 
it by merely thinking it, provided only that 
you think hard enough and directly enough 
and constantly enough; that thoughts are 
material things, and that the flower-like 
idea of success, well cultivated, brings of 
itself the fruit of realization. Many roads 
lead to the goal. There is room at the top 
for everybody. Make haste, rest not, sleep 
not; but like a star in its course speed on- 
ward, and the victory is yours. 

And what is it that the exhorters mean by 
success? One and all, this is what they 
mean : the attainment, or the state of attain- 
ment, of high place and rich rewards. No 
definition less material of aim or less opulent 
of promise would be thought by the instruc- 
tors of the multitude to be worth while; nor, 
indeed, would any other satisfy the common 
desire or the common understanding. This 
is an age of material achievements, and the 
meaning of the word necessarily takes on 
the form and pressure of the age. 

Never was the counsel to win success so 

[101 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

loud-voiced and so insistent as now. Never 
was there such a multitude of counselors. 
The pursuit of success has been transformed 
into a sort of religion, and a horde of priests 
and oracles interpret its dogmas and dis- 
seminate its practical precepts. They tell 
you what things to do and what not to do. 
They tell you how to win the smile of the 
Success god when he is indulgent; how to 
gain his attention when he is listless or 
indifferent ; how to propitiate his anger when 
he frowns. The press pours forth a stream 
of volumes, revealing to you the hidden lore. 
They do not differ in degree greatly from the 
"past performance" sheets of the racing ex- 
perts, or the dream-books from which our 
Ethiopian brothers learn how to invest in lot- 
tery or policy, or from those writings so deft- 
ly blending piety and Mammonism which 
fascinate the Christian Scientists. They in- 
terpret for you the signs, the portents, the 
mystic meanings of things, and they furnish 
you with the approved litanies and forms 
of service. No matter who or what you are, 
salvation is within your reach. The Suc- 
[ii] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

cess god is merciful. You can, by easily 
learned rites and practices, 

"Break your birth's invidious bar, 
And breast the blows of circumstance," 

wresting from a reluctant world the crown 
of triumph. 

Under this incessant goad you strive and 
hasten, though often with drooping spirits 
and flagging strength. You seek to trip 
or to overbear those nearest you, that by 
eliminating your closest competitors you 
may multiply your chances. By all means 
which the law permits, and by many which 
it does not, you bear your part in the inter- 
minable struggle. Occasionally, some rebel- 
lious spirit, separating himself from the 
throng, and pausing by the roadside to 
watch the mad scramble, asks himself, 
"What is the use of all this? What, at 
best, are my real chances? Is this, in any 
event, the rightful activity of mankind, 
and is the goal which it seeks a reality or a 
delusion?" Ordinarily, he has no answer; 
or if he has, it is profitless, for the sound 
[l£] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

of the tumult and the hope of victory impel 
him to engage again in the great battle. 

You may have noted that the priests 
and oracles of success are not invariably 
examples of the efficacy of their own pre- 
cepts. Though some of them go clothed 
in splendor, the greater number seem still 
to be waiting the fulfillment of their prayers 
and the reward of their devotional practices. 
You may have noted that the greater num- 
ber of the followers seem also to have 
halted this side the earthly paradise. Effort 
there has been — aspiration and striving, 
the keeping of faith, the rigid observance of 
revealed precepts. Who is there that can- 
not picture the tragedy of the thousands 
of men and women, of boys and girls, who 
have toiled and dreamed and dared, who 
have renounced leisure and peace and 
pleasure and honor, in their devotion to the 
god of Success? They have failed, most 
of them; they have found circumstances 
so formidable that neither an ardent wish- 
ing them away nor an active battling against 
them has sensibly cleared the pathway. All 

[13] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the heroic effort of these aspiring beings 
has been expended on a vain quest. They 
are to-day, most of them, where they were 
when they started. The guide-books have 
been conned, the directions have been fol- 
lowed, the seekers have wearily trudged and 
striven along the indicated way. They 
have found it to be something else than a 
highway. Toll-places it has, where the 
toll of blood and tears and hopes and ethical 
principles is remorselessly taken up; but it 
has turned out to be not a turnpike, but 
an elongated treadmill, where every footing 
returns to its appointed place. 

Perhaps the cult of success is yet too new 
and nebulous to justify us in expecting so 
much from it; perhaps its creed has yet 
to be rounded out and made a coherent 
whole; perhaps some of its precepts need 
revision, or at least adjustment to time and 
circumstance; perhaps its mahatmas and 
yogis are of varying degrees of adeptness 
and cannot with equal skill point the way 
and the manner; or perhaps its followers 
have dwelt too strongly upon the letter of 

[14] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

the law rather than upon its spirit, and have 
thus failed in discipleship. Somewhere 
there is fault. The word of promise is 
broken to our ear as well as to our hope. 
What is it that the oracles of success 
specifically tell you? It would take some- 
thing more than a five-foot shelf to contain 
all the recent volumes dedicated to the pur- 
pose of aiding you in breasting the blows 
of circumstance and in breaking the invid- 
ious bar of your birth. Let us begin with 
that fountain-head of the success religion — 
that "innocent corrupter of youth," Dr. 
Orison Swett Marden. There is something 
about that name which suggests the prayer- 
ful attitude of the seeker of success — some- 
thing which suggests the morning offertory 
of the devotee to the opulent god. And 
what the name suggests his volumes reveal. 
The deity who could withstand the de- 
votional entreaty, or betray the trustfulness, 
or disdain the fervent piety based upon the 
sense of favors to come, that everywhere 
wells up in these pages, would deserve to be 
ranked with the malignant gods of some 

[15] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

cannibal tribe. Take such a volume as 
Peace, Power and Plenty. You are told 
therein that poverty is unnecessary, that 
the creator did not intend it; that "there 
is no providence which keeps a man in 
poverty, or in painful or distressing cir- 
cumstances." You are told that "poverty 
itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. 
It is the conviction that we are poor and 
must remain so that is fatal." You are 
told that "if we can conquer inward pov- 
erty, we can soon conquer poverty of out- 
ward things, for, when we change the mental 
attitude, the physical changes to corre- 
spond." 

The economic framework of society, the 
necessary divisions of labor, the enormous 
numerical preponderance (inevitable under 
the present system) of hard and ill-paid 
tasks, the mathematical impossibility that 
any considerable number of persons should 
escape therefrom — all this is serenely waved 
aside. Defects in the situation are admitted 
— great obstacles to preferment and dis- 
tinction, but yet nothing that need greatly 

[161 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

trouble the strong of soul and the resolved 
of heart. Listen : 

" I do not overlook the heartless, grinding, 
grasping practices of many of the rich, or 
the unfair and cruel conditions brought 
about by unscrupulous political and finan- 
cial schemers; but I wish to show the poor 
man that, notwithstanding all these things, 
multitudes of poor people do rise above 
their iron environment, and that there is 
hope for him. The mere fact that so many 
continue to rise, year after year, out of just 
such conditions as you may think are fatal 
to your advancement, ought to convince 
you that you also can conquer your environ- 
ment." 

So that, no matter whether you are a 
McKees Rocks mill-worker or a South 
Carolina factory operative, you can rise. 
"All our limitations," you are told, "are 
in our own minds. . . . We starve ourselves 
in the midst of plenty, because of our strang- 
ling thought. The opulent life stands ready 
to take us into its completeness, but our 
ignorance cuts us off." Then comes the 
individual counsel: 

2 [17] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

"If you want success, abundance, you 
must think success, you must think abun- 
dance. Stoutly deny the power of adversity 
or poverty to keep you down. Constantly 
assert your superiority to your environment. 
Believe that you are to dominate your sur- 
roundings, that you are the master and not 
the slave of circumstances. Resolve with 
all the vigor you can muster that since there 
are plenty of good things in the world for 
everybody, you are going to have your share, 
without injuring anybody else or keeping 
others back. It was intended that you 
should have a competence, an abundance. 
It is your birthright. You are success 
organized, and constructed for happiness, 
and you should resolve to reach your divine 
destiny." 

There are other oracles than Dr. Marden. 
Of course all the oracles do not tell you the 
same things. The virtues commended, the 
vices condemned, the methods approved by 
one, may be slighted by the next, and an 
emphasis put upon other factors. But one 
and all, they neglect to tell you the mathe- 
matical and logical chances. Like the 
agents of a great lottery, they appeal to 

[18] " 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

your gambling instinct: they tell you of 
the big winning made by Brown or Sniggle- 
fritz, and they inspire you to believe that 
what these men have done you can duplicate. 
They are not even as fair as the lottery agent ; 
they do not tell you how many grand prizes 
there are, and how many secondary prizes 
and tertiary prizes, and so on down to the 
least reward that can possibly be considered 
a prize. Nor do they tell you the number 
of blanks. They inflame your imagination 
till it sees the whole world richly hung with 
prizes, and you a certain winner. Under 
even favored conditions of birth and train- 
ing, with innate energy, native capacity 
and agreeableness of personality, there may 
still be enormous chances against you; in 
certain states and conditions of life not one 
of you in ten thousand can reasonably 
hope for a prize. Yet you suffer the 
Arabian Nights tale of fabulous riches within 
attainable grasp to possess you and to con- 
trol your thoughts and actions. 

They differ on many points, these oracles. 
But one and all they declare, with tireless 

[19] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

iteration, that the chances of success are 
greater than ever before. Like most orac- 
ular utterances, the declaration is sus- 
ceptible of a number of meanings. Do they 
mean, for instance, that there are more 
prizes to be won; or that with fewer prizes, 
or relatively the same number of prizes 
as before, some are richer prizes? Either 
or both propositions are true, according to 
the inspired oracle who happens to reply 
to you; and he will be echoed by any num- 
ber of those successful ones who have at- 
tained the earthly paradise. Yet despite 
the oracles and the winners, there are grave 
reasons for doubt. That the numerical 
chances of success have increased is improb- 
able, almost impossible; and though among 
the exceptional prizes some are richer, 
their number is smaller than the oracles 
assert or the devotees believe. 

The matter of numerical chances of suc- 
cess is really one of statistics, if only the 
statistics could be had. It ought to be 
readily ascertainable, from authenticated 
figures, if the number of high places, with 

[20] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

rich rewards attached, has increased in 
greater ratio than the proportion and num- 
ber of subordinate places. Unfortunately, 
these figures, in an adequate measure of 
comprehensiveness and detail, are not to be 
had. Our government statistics are, in 
some respects, a blessing. To glean and 
prepare them furnishes work for a great 
number of men, and diffuses good wages 
among a large part of the population. But 
as valuable and accurate contributions to 
the sum of human knowledge, a word so 
favorable can not invariably be said of them. 
Yet occasionally they give forth gleams of 
real information, and from these one may 
bring light to bear on some puzzling prob- 
lem. The census figures of 1900 on gainful 
occupations are helpful — at least, such of 
them as are gathered on schedules identical 
with those of 1890 — and enable us roughly 
to compare the proportion of chances. If 
these figures indicate anything, it is that 
the number of workers and aspirants has 
increased, along with a great increase in 
the number of subordinate places, and that 

[21] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the number of richly rewarded places has 
not kept the pace. 

Despite the annual paean chanted by 
Secretary Wilson, there are few rich prizes 
in agriculture. Even if there were, the 
chances of success are dwindling. The 
independent or employing farmer increased 
by seven per cent., but the farm laborers by 
twenty-three per cent. There are of course 
no rich prizes in domestic and personal 
service, and here again is a growth in 
numbers. As for the professions, a liberal 
interpretation of the word success might 
allow some few instances of its attainment. 
A fortunate corporation lawyer, a popular 
historical novelist, a "yellow" journalist 
beating the drums and sounding the cymbals 
in his own honor, or a physician attached in 
personal service to a magnate, might each 
be considered as dwelling about the purlieus 
of the garden of success. But these are few 
indeed, and the host of briefless attorneys, 
jobless journalists and "unavailable" liter- 
ary persons — all of them constantly increas- 
ing in numbers — bears witness to the fact 

[22] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

that there is no numerical increase in the 
great opportunities in the professions. 

It is in trade and transportation that you 
may get the most significant figures on the 
numerical chances. The increase in the 
number of mercantile underlings is, in some 
cases, enormous. Stenographers and type- 
writers have increased by two hundred and 
thirty-six per cent.; salesmen and sales- 
women, one hundred and thirty-one per 
cent. ; packers, shippers, porters and helpers 
one hundred and thirty per cent.; book- 
keepers and accountants, sixty per cent.; 
messengers and errand and office boys, 
forty per cent. On the other hand whole- 
sale merchants have increased by thirty- 
six per cent., and retail merchants, by 
nineteen and five-tenths per cent. Those 
presumably affluent persons, the bankers 
and brokers, have increased one hundred 
and one per cent.; but since nearly all of 
this increase is of money and stock brokers, 
as distinguished from commercial brokers, 
and since it includes persons from every 
variety of the transient, "get-rich-quick" 

[23] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

and other unstable concerns, it indicates 
little more than the current rage for specula- 
tion and the eagerness of the metropolitan 
sharpers to accommodate a Barnumized 
public. The figures for officials of banks 
and companies are not comparable with 
those of 1890, owing to a difference in the 
schedules. As given, they show a large 
increase; but a proper discount, taken on 
the basis of fraudulent and parasitic com- 
panies in the market, would sensibly dimin- 
ish their volume. Whatever the foregoing 
figures may be held to indicate regarding 
"room at the top," it is undeniable that they 
show a generous and growing spaciousness 
of room at the bottom. They give no 
warrant whatever for the promise of in- 
creased opportunities. 

Indeed, this lesson is exactly what one 
learns in looking about the big mercantile 
concerns. Combination has proceeded al- 
most steadily since 1897; and, though the 
growth of independent companies has, to a 
small extent, operated as an offset, the con- 
sequence, as a whole, has been a lessening 

[24] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

of the number of secure and well-paid 
places. The future American Dickens, 
when he wants material for a story that in 
Francis Bacon's words "comes home to 
men's business and bosoms," may profitably 
seek out some of the individual tragedies 
that have resulted from any of these com- 
binations. One instance in particular is 
that of the union of three enormously rich 
metropolitan companies in one of the textile 
branches some few years ago. Day after 
day, month after month, for three years, 
throughout the clerical and managerial 
forces of the three establishments, discharges 
from employment were steadily made until 
one man in every four was dismissed. 
These places have never been restored, and 
of the persons discharged not one in fifty, 
it is estimated, has ever succeeded in gaining 
an equally remunerative place. 

Perhaps to the petty business man more 
than to any other is success a vision by day 
and a dream by night. It is only the excep- 
tional retailer who does not see in his little 
store the potential beginning of a great 

[25] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

mercantile Tiouse, and only the exceptional 
petty manufacturer who does not regard 
himself as a possible captain of industry. 
Yet every month and every day the great 
wheels of capitalism move onward like the 
car of Juggernaut. The little businesses 
are crushed, and an added wealth and 
power comes to the few. From him that 
hath not is taken away even the little that 
he hath. Yet in numbers, the oracles 
say, the little businesses persist. So, as to 
numbers, do the evanescent bubbles in a 
mountain stream persist. But the bubble 
of a moment ago is no more, even though 
its place has been taken by another. The 
little businesses form and then vanish. The 
temptation to "go into business for oneself" 
is always alluring. The pains and drudgery 
of wage-earning labor, the subordination 
and routine of salaried labor, are a known 
quantity; and so is the yearly recompense, 
at least in any trade or calling where employ- 
ment is steady. But the possible revenues 
from a business enterprise are unknown, 
and the imagination runs free in picturing 

[26] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

them. So, though failure and liquidation 
and bankruptcy attend the attempt, the 
horde of shopkeepers and petty manufac- 
turers persists. There are no such strivers 
for success as these; they follow, in the 
main, the hallowed precepts of the oracles; 
and yet the earthly paradise is denied all 
but an infinitesimal few of them. 

There is then the promise of richer re- 
wards for the few. That the very rich 
— the gleaners of rent, interest and profit 
— have increased in numbers, both abso- 
lutely and relatively, seems evident from the 
census figures. There is a larger annual 
harvest from the labor of men's hands and 
the planning of men's brains; and there 
is a larger body of claimants for the surplus. 
That one result of combination has been the 
creation of a number of highly paid places 
is not to be doubted. But these are not 
many, and their creation has but coincided 
with the abolition of other well-paid places 
in the original companies that have entered 
into combination. Whether the salaries of 
these desirable places in the bosom of the 

[27] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

trusts equal the salaries formerly paid by 
the original companies is a matter for dis- 
pute. In one corporation they will be 
greater, in another less, and the average no 
man knows. Outside of the trusts there 
are still highly paid places, and there are 
still opportunities for individual initiative. 
But there is one fact bearing upon this phase 
of the subject which is too often lost sight 
of. The present-day aspirant for success 
on his own initiative labors amid a different 
host of circumstances from those which 
surrounded the industrial magnate in his 
earlier days. Through the assiduous — and, 
as some think, pestilent — interference of 
legislatures and Congress, it has become 
impossible to do some of the things which 
in the past days were proper and even emula- 
tory. The magnates of to-day laid the 
basis of their fortunes in a golden age when 
"liberty" was but slightly restricted — when 
a man could do what he willed not only with 
his own, but also with his neighbor's. The 
progress of civilization, according to Huxley, 
has been attended by a constant setting of 

[28] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

limits to the fratricidal struggle; and our 
legislators, doubtless impressed with the 
idea that civilization here in America has 
not yet reached its zenith, have contributed 
a large share of these restrictions. The 
sprightly activities directed to the wiping 
out of competitors, which Mr. Lloyd re- 
counts in his Wealth Against Common- 
wealth as usual twenty years ago, have 
had their day. With good counsel, large 
resources and a friendly or financially inter- 
ested judge, the aspirant toward an indus- 
trial dukedom may yet, at certain times 
and in favored places, repeat some of the 
tactics then common. But, even so, there 
are limits, for the old order has changed, 
yielding place to a new one, and in general 
he must conduct his campaign according 
to the statutory restrictions. Even to the 
"arriving" magnate, therefore, the richer 
rewards are promised in vain. Prizes com- 
mensurate with those of the recent past are 
not to be had. 

The assumption that in paid service supe- 
rior intelligence and energy win greater 

[29] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

relative reward than of old is at least un- 
proved, and is for many reasons doubtful. 
What the oracles mean by this is that a 
Napoleon or an Alexander of industry can, 
within certain limits, set his own price for 
his services. But in industry, as well as 
in war and in statecraft, this has always 
been so, and there is nothing whatever novel 
about it. Whether it will continue to be 
so in the near future cannot be said. But 
no generalizations based upon such extraor- 
dinary exceptions will serve for the matter 
in hand. What the rapt youths clustering 
about the altar rail of success want to know 
is whether or not the much-vaunted "brains 
and hustle," of which we now hear so much, 
are more richly paid, relative to the results 
achieved, than of old. The assurances are 
many and positive; but they are based, for 
the most part, on the most superficial guess- 
work. The monopolies, though benevolent, 
are not prodigal; and outside the monop- 
olies a sharp competition still reigns; the 
wage-earners, through their unions, demand 
an increased share of the returns; the 

[30] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

leeches of rent, interest and depreciation 
are ever at work; and miscellaneous ex- 
penses and the cost of material (in most 
cases) are rising. Thus the keenest and 
most practical intelligence applied to an 
established business may be productive only 
of slight savings and a slight increase in 
sales. Where the added recompense to 
genius is to come from it is hard to deter- 
mine. With the exceptional growth of a 
business, genius is sometimes increasingly 
rewarded, but the increase is almost cer- 
tainly incommensurate with the results 
achieved. 

It is the young men, say the oracles, who 
have all the chances. There is small doubt 
of this, and it may be conceded at once. As 
Nature's darling is the strong, so Capital's 
darling is the young. The combat grows 
fiercer — on the part of the independent 
companies against one another, and on the 
part of the monopolies against society — 
and only the young can bear the brunt of 
the struggle. The young are plastic and 
tractable, still capable of an adjustment to 

[31] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

fit their surroundings. In them can be 
developed just that extra length or finer 
curve of beak or claw by which to gouge or 
eviscerate rivals, whereas the talons of the 
old have been dulled and worn away. 
Whatever, therefore, the future holds, is 
theirs. The middle-aged and the old are 
sent to the rear, while the youths are hurried 
to the front, inspired by the promise of 
infinite glories in a finite and not too remote 
future. 

The oracles, it has already been said, 
always neglect to tell you the numerical 
chances. They do not deal with the hard 
facts of life. They are the founders of a new 
school of fiction — the materialist school. Let 
us examine their promises on the basis of a 
single industry and see how they work out. 
Let us take, for instance, the interstate 
railroads. Of the 1,458,244 employes in 
the United States (1908) how many can 
hope ever to be numbered among the 5,767 
general officers? You are an employe, 
we shall say; and in mere numbers^ you 
have about one chance in 252 of reaching 

[32] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

your goal. No matter how efficient you 
become, no matter what hours you give to 
study and plan and fit yourself for " higher" 
things, it is not likely that the number of 
general officers will be greatly increased. 
If you and all of your fellows became the 
executive equals of the 5,767 general officers, 
there would still be places for only one 
in 252 of you. Then, too, probably only 
about one-half of the general staff come up 
from the ranks — the other half coming from 
the sons and nephews and retainers of rich 
and influential men — and so your numerical 
chances are really not more than one in 
500. 

But the proportion of mere numbers is 
not enough. There are other factors to 
consider. In many of the branches of rail- 
road service the qualities needed for ef- 
ficiency are not the qualities needed in 
"higher" places. You may be an expert 
track-layer, a brave and skilful locomotive 
engineer. Your expertness in these lines 
fits you rather for continuance in your pres- 
ent work than for translation to other 

3 [33] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

spheres, and you will find your special ex- 
cellence a bar to advancement. Then, too, 
there are casualties to account for, and 
thus there is a further qualifying of the 
numerical chances. Suppose you are a 
trainman. Every year about one in eight 
of you is wounded; about one in 133 is 
killed. You have thus a much better chance 
of achieving wounds or death than of achiev- 
ing success. Even if you happen to be em- 
ployed in some of the safer branches of the 
industry, there may be numberless chances 
against you. You may have had to begin 
work as a boy and therefore to forego an 
education. Your mother-tongue may not 
be English, and that fact is a handicap of 
no mean importance. You may have few 
friends and be without the rare faculty of 
making them. Then, too, you may have 
ethical scruples against taking advantage 
of men and occasions, and in critical times 
the observance of these scruples will block 
your advancement. The oracles cannot 
help you ; the guide-books cannot give you 
light. The lure of success may draw you, 

[34] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

but you will ultimately find it a vain 
lure. 

Or perhaps you are not a railroad em- 
ploye, but a factory worker in a mill town. 
From childhood you have been taught to do 
one thing only, and to do it over and over 
again. Perhaps you are fortunate above 
some of your fellows in that you have a 
"four-motion" job instead of a monotonous 
"three-motion" job. A right-hand move- 
ment left, a left-hand movement right, 
both hands up and then both hands down — 
and this over and over again, five hours in 
the morning, five hours in the afternoon, 
six days in the week, four and a fraction 
weeks in the month, and whatever number 
of months in the year your master chooses 
to employ you. Your every faculty has 
been hardened about this one task, unfitting 
you for any other. Your meager earnings 
just suffice to keep you and your dependents 
alive. You cannot move from your en- 
vironment. Your life and the life of others 
depends upon the work-place to which you 
are attached. What other thought can you 

[35] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

possibly have than the "poverty thought " ? 
Would it, if it were possible, avail you aught 
to have any other? What possible mes- 
sage can the oracles have for you? What 
possible degree of success is conceivably 
within your grasp ? 

There is another thing the oracles neglect 
to tell you. In the vast and complex scheme 
of things, the "lower" places are just as 
necessary as the "higher" places. The 
1,452,477 railroad men other than general 
officers are not employed through philan- 
thropy. They are not employed by reason 
of the rich man's pleasure in paying wages 
to the poor man. They are employed 
because, upon a hard, unsentimental, cash 
basis, it takes that many men to do the 
work. It cannot be done by machinery nor 
by thought transference. It must be done 
by muscle and brain. No matter how 
efficient and masterful you become, these 
places would still have to be filled. You 
never heard, did you, that any of these 
places went begging? No matter how 
many men, according to the oracles, have 

[36] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

scaled the walls of the earthly paradise, 
the common work has still to be done, and 
there is ever an eager army pleading for 
the chance to do it. How shall it be done 
if all listen to the oracles of success ? 

Again the rebellious spirit stops by the 
wayside to think it over and to wonder what 
it is all about. "What is the abiding 
result," he may ask, "of this exhortation to 
struggle, and of all this tremendous trumpet- 
ing of success ?" The result, he reflects, 
surely cannot be efficiency, for the efficient 
labor for the joy and pride of their work. 
It can have no kinship with the social feel- 
ings, for he that concerns himself about 
sympathy, fellowship and justice has given 
hostages to fortune which he can never 
ransom. Nor can it have any kinship with 
ethics; for, indeed, an ardent pursuit of 
success involves an almost entire avoidance 
of ethical precepts. The ethical element 
rarely or never enters into the exhortations. 
" Get money ! " " Get ahead ! " and " Forge 
to the front!" are the slogans. The stirring 
words of a popular song, 

[37] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

"Swamp 'em, swamp 'em, 
Get the wampum!" 

reflects the common mind. And so the 
frantic devotees wrestle and climb, with 
small thought of other considerations; and 
so, too, the rebellious spirit by the wayside 
is again swept on by the surging tide. 

The fault is not that of the individual, 
except secondarily. It lies in the inevitable 
stresses and impulsions of the conflict by 
man against man for the means of life. 
In such a conflict the common ideal must 
necessarily be one of triumph over one's 
fellow-man, and the modes of warfare must 
be those of one's rivals. He that would 
live among armed men must bear arms. 
"The rigid chain of competition," writes 
Mr. Otis Kendall Stuart in The Independ- 
ent, " literally binds him [the business man] 
to use all the desperate means of his busi- 
ness rival, . . . the same refined mendacity 
and mountainous exaggeration. In many 
lines the exaggeration and mendacity are 
as necessary tools of trade as the improved 
machinery and the automatic methods. 

[38] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

They are planned with consummate art, are 
perfectly systematized, and might easily be 
classified by a political economist." 

No, the pursuit of material success solves 
nothing in this world worth solving. It 
is a cult which deceives and demoralizes 
and ruins, which blinds men to their actual 
situation in life and which evades or ignores 
the real solution of poverty. Instead of 
fostering co-operation, the natural tendency 
of social man, it foments strife. It dooms 
the multitudes to stumble about in privation 
and ignorance, led by a false light and a 
vain hope. By joining hands for a com- 
mon purpose, you might achieve a material 
success in which all would share — one which 
would be the enduring basis of a higher 
success, a success of the social instincts 
and feelings, a success of moral and intel- 
lectual endeavor. By striving for individual 
material gain, you but wreck your own and 
others' opportunities. 

There is thus another success than that 
taught by the oracles — a success often 
characterized by a chain of apparent defeats. 

[39] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

It is a success which scorns poverty; or 
which, though sensible of its blight and 
pain, accepts it unflinchingly in its quest 
of higher things. It is the success of a 
Jesus, a Mazzini, a Marx. It is the success 
of thousands of lesser men in all times, 
whose deeds are unchronicled, and whose 
names, long forgotten, can never be resur- 
rected. It is the success which, though 
generally uncrowned in the lifetime of the 
individual, achieves its crown in the social 
advancement of the race. Is this too re- 
mote or barren a reward for which to strive ? 
But barren or remote as it may seem to 
the being nursed in the environment of 
fratricidal strife and of material gain, it 
bears its immediate guerdon to the individ- 
ual life. There is a luminous passage in 
Prof. Karl Hilty's little work on Happiness 
which you might well memorize and make 
a part of you : 

" One of our own contemporaries, Thiers, 
a man who had in high degree attained 
success, and who at certain points in his 
life pursued it with excessive zeal, once 

[40] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

made this striking remark: 'Men of prin- 
ciple need not succeed. Success is necessary 
only to schemers.' In other words, a genu- 
ine victory over the world is not to be 
achieved through that kind of success which 
the French call succds, and which for many 
men makes the end of effort. He who plays 
the game of ambition may as well abandon 
the hope of peace of mind or of peace with 
others, and in most cases he must forfeit 
outright his self-respect." 

Success, then, in its ordinary meaning, 
in the meaning of the oracles, is not victory, 
either over the world or over yourself; it 
is too often defeat and impoverishment. It 
is the sacrifice of what is best in man for 
a trumpery prize. Whether, as with the 
overwhelming mass of mankind, by whom 
the goal can never be attained, or whether, 
as with the few, by whom it is attained in 
some measure, the rage of pursuit inevitably 
means the hardening of the social feelings, 
the extinguishment of the spirit of brother- 
hood, the clouding and darkening of the 
social vision by which a people live and 
become great. It obliterates all inward 

[41] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

peace and sets the heart and faculties at 
war with creatures of your own kind. In 
its fiercer promptings it might, rather than 
physical lust, have been the theme of the 
great 129th sonnet of Shakespeare. The 
lust of success 

"Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, 
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust." 

It is as a swallowed bait, which makes the 
taker mad — 

"Mad in pursuit, and in possession so: 
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; 

A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe. 
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." 

And even in its more moderate promptings 
it differs from this not in kind, but only in 
degree. 

We must have conflict, say the Individual- 
ists, who stand as the philosophical sponsors 
of the oracles of success. We must have 
obstacles to war against in order to bring 
out and develop the sturdy virtues. But 
the estimable qualities which the Individ- 
ualists tell us are developed only by conflict 

[42] 



TO THE SEEKERS OF SUCCESS 

can still find nurture and growth even 
though the rage of success be calmed and 
the war of each against all be ended. Says 
Prof. David G. Ritchie, in his Darwinism 
and Politics: 

"If we are still reminded that only 
through struggle can mankind attain any 
good thing, let us remember that there is a 
struggle from which we can never altogether 
escape — the struggle against nature, in- 
cluding the blind forces of human passion. 
There will always be enough to do in this 
ceaseless struggle to call forth all the energies 
of which human nature at its very best is 
capable." 

In the strife for worldly success you waste 
energies which would enrich the world. 
You rob yourself and all men. However 
poor in nature you may be, you can yet 
contribute to the real success of mankind. 
There is everything to do. What though 
the event men call defeat forever recurs to 
you ? In an ill-adjusted world, where bru- 
tality and cunning and selfishness triumph, 
there is no humiliation in the thing called 

[43] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

defeat, so only that the goal striven for 
is the common good. The humiliation is 
rather in the consciousness of the misuse 
of our fellows for our own material gain, in 
the obstructing and halting of the onward 
march of mankind. Though the oracles 
rave, and their followers imagine a vain 
thing, be it yours to emulate rather than to 
compete, to help rather than to harm, to 
struggle for and with rather than against 
mankind, to forego the lure of what men 
of the modern jungle call success, and to 
seek the success of one in the success of all. 



[44] 



CHAPTER II 



TO THE REFORMERS 



You are hopeful men, you reformers. 
Though you want and demand some of the 
things that Socialists want, you distrust 
and oppose Socialism. You expect, by 
eternally patching the weak and threadbare 
places in the present order, to make it last 
while time lasts. The augmentation of 
charity, the increase of benevolences, the 
extension of "welfare work," the occasional 
and guarded experimentations with regula- 
tive legislation, and the furthering of what- 
ever is meant by that unctuous modern 
phrase, " constructive and preventive philan- 
thropy" — these are your means for remedy- 
ing acknowledged evils. More than these 
you say is dangerous. One evil at a time, 
you say, though a thousand evils throng 
about us. We must not be in a hurry. 

[45] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

Though pain and privation are everywhere, 
too sudden a cure, you say, may be harmful 
alike to individual and to society. The 
pinch of want does not touch you; you are 
secure from harm. You can therefore 
afford to wait. And what you can afford, 
you narrowly think that mankind can 
afford. 

There is an opposite attitude to yours, 
as you know. It will be set down here, that 
the contrast may be kept in mind as 
we go along. It is the attitude of Socialism. 
Socialism aims to abolish the acknowl- 
edged evils of to-day by transferring the 
social means of production and distribution 
from private to collective ownership. Its 
methods in attaining this aim are to organ- 
ize, educate and discipline the class of 
wage-earning workers, the class which suf- 
fers most under the prevailing system, and 
which has most to hope for under the pro- 
posed system; to hold this disciplined body 
separate and apart from other bodies, and 
to prompt it to win, by its own force, from 
the owning class, whatever immediate con- 

[46] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

cessions it can without in any manner 
compromising its ultimate aim. It strives 
by all efforts in its power to increase its 
vote at the ballot-box. It believes that by 
this increase the attainment of its goal is 
brought ever nearer, and also that the 
menace of this increasing vote induces the 
capitalist class to grant concessions in the 
hope of preventing further increases. It 
criticises non-Socialist efforts at reform as 
comparatively barren of positive benefit and 
as tending, on the whole, to insure the dom- 
inance of the capitalist class and to continue 
the graver social evils now prevalent. 

No doubt you censure and denounce 
this uncompromising attitude of Socialism. 
You want what you call "practical results," 
and you believe that these results are best 
obtained by opportunist methods. Social 
evolution, you say, must be gradual and 
uniformitarian, as you imagine physical 
evolution to be. You appeal to history, too, 
in an attempt to show that most reforms have 
come by moderate and gradual changes. 
The extension of manhood suffrage, the 

[47] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

general abolishment of the property quali- 
fication for office-holding, the growth of 
factory legislation, the increase of wages, 
the shortening of the work-day — all are 
instanced by you as advances made by 
means of a policy directly opposed to the 
separatist and thoroughgoing policy of 
the Socialist party. Step-at-a-time is your 
motto, and compromise and appeals to the 
better nature of the ruling class are your 
means of action. 

Small Latin and less Greek, and some- 
thing less than an encyclopedic holding in 
social science, are needed by the Socialists 
to question such assertions and to reject 
such methods. Long before De Vries and 
Burbank came to our aid with their proof 
of mutations in the physical world, we knew 
out of history that social evolution has other 
movements than those of gradual and 
uniformitarian transformations. Violent 
and revolutionary changes are made. 
French revolutions, English and American 
civil wars, abolitions of feudal privileges 
and of chattel slavery, interrupt the peace- 

[48] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

ful progress of society, just as Krakatoa 
and Mont Pelee accompany the age-long 
erosion of the Grand Canon of the Colorado 
or the washing down of the detritus of the 
Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. Evo- 
lution makes use of all forms of motion. 
She multiplies her effects by infinitesimal 
gradations, but when this multiplication 
reaches the allotted sum she overturns, in 
the twinkling of an eye, states and systems, 
as she explodes mountains and uplifts 
valleys. 

As social evolution is not universally 
gradual, neither is it universally pacific. 
On the contrary, its main impulse has ever 
been a conflict of interests. Classes have 
opposed classes in all historic times. The 
efforts of the possessing classes to hold and 
of the non-possessing to acquire have deter- 
mined, in large part, the social order. The 
common illusion that the acknowledged ad- 
vances toward democracy and well-being 
have been caused by a spread of altruistic 
ideas and the breaking of class lines is 
dispelled when we look seriously at the 

4 [49] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

contemporary economic and political con- 
ditions. Altruism is rather an effect than 
a cause. Moreover, though certain social 
advances benefit all classes, the conflict 
of interests grows apace. When England 
granted the reforms of 1832 she did it not 
out of an expansion of democratic sentiment, 
but to avert a civil war. The rising class 
of manufacturers and traders pressed heavily 
against the ruling class of nobility and 
gentry for a share of political power, and 
would not be dissuaded. To win their 
point they enlisted, for the moment, the 
support of the working class. The first 
factory acts were passed not because of a 
humanitarian interest on the part of the 
"upper classes" (except in rare individual 
cases), but because the rapid annihilation of 
the peasantry and proletariat jeoparded the 
existence of the English army, and because 
the nobility, jealous of the rival class of 
manufacturers and traders, were willing, 
even eager, to clip their powers and profits. 
When Bismarck gave manhood suffrage 
to Germany it was not through devotion 

[50] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

to an abstract principle of democracy. He 
recognized the force of the particularist 
patriotism binding men to their various 
little kingdoms and principalities; and to 
oppose that force he sought to create a 
tie binding men by a dominant interest to 
the Empire. To this day Germany dis- 
plays the anomaly of a nation electing its 
national representative body by manhood 
suffrage, but electing its various state and 
municipal bodies by the grossest forms of 
property suffrage. The winning of the 
suffrage in America is another case in point. 
Had altruism or the consciousness of a 
classless society determined the matter, 
surely the men who wrote the democratic 
generalizations of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence would have conceded the suffrage 
to working-men. But they did not; their 
economic interests opposed manhood suf- 
frage, and it had to be wrested from the 
rulers by a long series of attacks by the 
working class. 

There is thus, as society is now consti- 
tuted, an enduring conflict of interests; 

[51] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

and it is force, actual or potential, that wins 
advances. But it is force directed in par- 
ticular ways, according to the issue and the 
political and economic environment. The 
reforms here instanced were incidental and 
partial; they had to do, for the most part, 
with political rather than economic matters, 
and they did not in themselves menace 
the supremacy of capitalism. Indeed, they 
may be held to have conserved, to have 
strengthened capitalism; for they have fur- 
nished what has been so far a peaceful and 
harmless outlet for popular dissatisfaction. 
As they did not jeopard the system of cap- 
italism, the question of granting them could, 
and often did, divide and array against one 
another the various factions of the wealth- 
owning class. 

Far clearer is the situation with regard 
to industrial reforms — reforms which, in- 
tended to safeguard the health and lives of 
the workers, do in effect lessen the profits 
of capitalists and curtail the powers of 
capitalism. Against such reforms all the 
various sections of the wealth-owning class 

[52] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

are usually united. And yet it is in regard 
to just such reforms that you criticise the 
Socialist method and seek to better the con- 
dition of the workers by paltry philanthro- 
pies, by petty amendments to legislation, or 
by trifling administrative reforms — always by 
and through co-operation with the wealth- 
owning class or individual owners of wealth. 
The obvious, the apparent argument is 
confessedly with you in your reformism, your 
opportunism. When you give coal to the 
fireless or medicine to the ill, you can of 
course see an immediate benefit. No one 
can doubt that charity relieves a multitude 
of hungry stomachs. The sympathetic in- 
terest, the kindly care, dispensed at some 
of the settlements is a helpful, and some- 
times a lasting, benefit to the poor children 
of the tenements. Or, passing from benev- 
olence to reform, one can see at least a pos- 
sibility of benefits in laws ordering seats for 
shop-girls, reducing the hours of women in 
the factories, or in international agreements 
to promote labor legislation. One may even 
see, though doubtless more dimly, such 

[53] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

possibility in laws aiming at the curtail- 
ment of graft, or the regulation of issues of 
stocks and bonds, or in the creation of public 
utilities commissions. 

But there is, as Lester Ward tells us in 
his Pure Sociology, an optical aberration 
known as the " illusion of the near." " If we 
magnify any object sufficiently," he writes, 
"it loses its character." To be seen rightly, 
it must be seen in relation to other things. 
These immediate and incidental benefits, 
seen too closely and seen also under the 
magnifying influence of a sense of your 
personal share in achieving them, may take 
on a size and importance wholly out of their 
reality. 

For these things, even when real benefits, 
may be gained at a sacrifice of greater 
benefits. It is nothing at all of permanent 
social advantage to have a few hundred 
children welcomed and schooled at the 
settlements, if at the same time several 
hundred thousand children in the nation 
are added to the army of wage-earners. 
It is nothing to pass a few laws in behalf 

[54] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

of the industrial workers, if every year the 
lot of thousands of wage-earners becomes 
more wretched. A general safety-appliance 
law is a delusive thing to boast of, if proof 
can be shown that the ratio of railway 
casualties increases year by year. Nor is it 
anything to be able to chronicle a step here 
and a step there toward municipal ownership, 
if constantly the concentration of wealth be- 
comes more accentuated. Every one, even 
the most extreme revolutionist, is able to 
see petty changes for the better now and 
then. But what is needed is a clear- 
sighted estimate of these benefits in their 
relation to social progress as a whole. 

Now the Socialist policy is not to disdain 
concessions from the owning or capitalist 
class, but to consider always the character 
of such concessions and the mode by which 
they are gained. The Socialist party never 
permits itself to forget that the working 
class may accept charity, or legislative or 
administrative gifts, at the sacrifice of its 
discipline, of its integrity, and in jeopardy 
of the attainment of its ultimate rights. A 

[55] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

notable part of its function is perpetually 
to warn the working-class Esau not to sell 
his birthright for a bad meal. 

In legislative bodies its representatives 
always vote for those measures believed by 
them to be of advantage to the working 
class. But they concern themselves very 
little with those trumpery measures which 
in increasing number are introduced in our 
legislatures, and sometimes in our reform 
conventions — measures which reveal the 
dying struggles of the so-called "middle 
class," and its desperate clutching at any- 
thing which may keep it for another moment 
above water. The rank and file of the 
Socialist party, however, take upon them- 
selves the obligation not to vote for the men 
or measures of any other party. Of course, 
you denounce this policy. But even the 
most republican army of which any one 
can conceive would hardly permit the relax- 
ation of its discipline to the point where the 
soldiers in the ranks could dicker with the 
enemy. And it is as members of a social 
army that the units of the Socialist party 

[56] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

regard themselves. A ministerial function, 
hedged in and sharply bounded by dem- 
ocratic authority, is given to its legislative 
representatives, but the ranks themselves 
maintain a disciplined unity. The rank and 
file, then, sanction in their representatives 
the voting for beneficial measures, but they 
keep these legates ever charged with the 
duty of not forgetting the ultimate aim. 

It is the fashion just now to ridicule, or 
to try to ridicule, so-called extreme views, 
and to lay stress upon so-called practical 
action. Separated some decades from the 
time and having no personal interests at 
stake, you can now all of you honor and 
extol the extremists of the American Revo- 
lution, and in a somewhat lesser degree, 
because nearer in point of time, the ex- 
tremists of the Abolition movement. But 
you denounce the men who, in our own 
time, are carrying these former revolutions 
to their inescapable conclusions. These 
men are troubling the general complacency, 
they are jarring mankind from the "trance 
of every-day life," and they are disturbing 

[57] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the "interests." Everywhere one hears this 
chorus of exhortation to be practical; to 
shun the misguided, the unbalanced, the 
visionary Socialist, and to "get things done." 
"We Socialists," said Bebel once, "have 
no dogmas. We are a party of learners." 
If any doctrine or contention of ours can 
be shown to be unfounded, we are eager to 
have proof. Just now we are clamorous 
for an itemized account regarding the gen- 
eral and enduring benefits of the step-at- 
a-time policy. The supporters of a policy 
alleged to be so practical ought to be able 
to show a ledger with many and important 
entries on the credit side, and few and less 
weighty entries on the debit side. We want 
it shown to us that by reason of some 
ten or twenty years of grave discussions 
by economists, by reason of the activity of 
city clubs, of reform associations, of non- 
partisan citizens' movements, of Democratic 
"radicals" or Republican "insurgents," of 
committees of one sort and another formed 
for the purpose of obtaining some immediate 
good, any general enduring good has been 

[58] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

gained. We want it shown that by the 
operation of these methods wealth has been 
more equitably distributed, the lot of the 
industrial worker has been bettered; the 
number of industrial casualties has been 
diminished; pauperism, insanity and crime 
have been sensibly lessened; political and 
commercial graft has been curtailed; the 
equality of rich and poor before the law 
has been advanced; employment has been 
made more secure; general opportunities 
have been extended, or, in a word, any 
general progress worthy of the name toward 
a more ideal state of society has been 
achieved. 

It is with almost jaunty confidence that 
the Socialists challenge the production of 
such a ledger. Many reformers may no 
doubt have bettered their own condition 
in ten or twenty years, and now, seeing 
life through the roseate colors of happier 
surroundings, may easily translate their own 
progress into that of the world in general, 
causing them to dower the most wretched 
of their fellows with imagined blessings. 

[59] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

But something more than the personal 
equation applied to guesswork is demanded 
in this place. 

This is a specific demand, with a definite 
time period. It would be idle to deny that 
in decades or centuries many kinds of 
progress have been made. Society is always 
in a state of instability, and is ever seeking, 
consciously or unconsciously, to adjust it- 
self to the changing mode of producing and 
distributing goods — to the economic process 
upon which it is founded. These adjust- 
ments, however, in so far as they are real 
adjustments, are things with which you 
reformers have little to do. In the earlier 
period of an economic system they are 
generally spontaneous and unconscious, and 
in the later period they are conscious, being 
the result of the growing power of an advanc- 
ing class. They are adjustments with which 
you reformers have about as much to do as 
had the proverbial fly in raising the cloud 
of dust about the chariot wheel. 

You must show, then, not merely that by 
your methods you have caused to be done 

[60] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

this thing or that, but that the thing done 
was worth the doing — that it has made some 
observable betterment of social conditions. 
We have a period in the history of this 
country wherein such a test can fairly be 
applied. The Henry George uprising oc- 
curred in the summer and fall of 1886. It 
marked the beginning of a crusade of op- 
portunist endeavor. In the twenty-four 
years following that time we have had every 
imaginable sort of effort at correcting evils. 
We have had many conventions of econo- 
mists and publicists, we have instituted labor 
bureaus, passed innumerable labor and 
railroad laws in the States, while the nation 
has given us among other things an anti- 
trust law, a contract-labor law, an interstate 
commerce law and a safety-appliance law. 
Benefactions have grown more princely, we 
have more than doubled the number of our 
benevolent institutions, we have enormously 
increased our charities, we have transformed 
many of our colleges and universities from 
cottages into palaces, we have laid out parks 
and playgrounds, and we have dotted the 

[61] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

cities with settlements. Surely, after so 
much practical endeavor, after so great 
achievement, the social state of the country 
should be well-nigh ideal. There should 
be no poverty, no luxury, little crime. 
There should be peace and plenty, just 
administration of law, honesty alike in 
public and private service, and each man 
should be able to sit unafraid in the shadow 
of his vine and fig-tree, and as he remembers 
with scorn the wild denunciations and the 
visionary proposals of the foolish Socialists, 
contemplate with rapture the blessings 
gained for him by practical, step-at-a-time 
effort. 

Let us see what are some of these wonder- 
ful social gains in the last ten or twenty 
years. We are paying, as a nation, on the 
authority of Professor Charles J. Bushnell, 
$6,000,000,000 annually for our charities 
and corrections. These figures are appall- 
ing, and it is hard to say just how they are 
to be confirmed by data now available. 
But Professor Bushnell, in a sharp repiy to 
his critics, reiterates them, and indicates 

[62] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

sources from which, he maintains, they can 
be sustained. If they are correct, they show 
a constant and growing deficit in our ac- 
counts as a nation. For in the four years 
1900-04, at least the latter part of this period 
having been graced with a truly wonderful 
degree of so-called "prosperity," the national 
wealth increased, according to the census, 
at the rate of only $4,646,000,000 yearly. 
We should thus be gaining four and three- 
quarter billions yearly, and paying it all, 
and a billion and a quarter besides, to 
square the account with the victims. 

Anyway, we are gaining now at the rate 
of four and three-quarter billions a year. 
From 1880 to 1900 our wealth increased 
from forty-three to ninety-five billions. 
But who got the increase? Is wealth any 
more widely distributed to-day than it was 
twenty-five years ago ? There are a number 
of prosperous persons, and others who 
through their subservience hope to be pros- 
perous, who say so. But it is doubtful if any 
considerable number of the unprosperous 
take them seriously. There are the savings- 

[63] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

bank statistics, of course — the first and last 
refuge of the optimistic statistician. It is 
almost needless to say, however, that in 
this day no one whose judgment counts 
for much accepts savings-bank figures as 
an index of working-class conditions. And 
there is nothing else that can be even juggled 
into indicating increased prosperity among 
the wage- workers. 

Unfortunately, we have had very little 
work on the distribution of wealth in 1880. 
But with 1890 we have the computations of 
Mr. Lucien Sanial, Mr. George K. Holmes 
and Dr. Charles B. Spahr. Mr. Thomas 
G. Shearman's computation was made in 
1889, but it differs in only minor particulars 
from Mr. Sanial's. All of these estimates 
are in fairly close agreement — a remarkable 
fact, considering the different methods by 
which they were reached. They show, 
averaging them, that not less than 51 per 
cent, of the nation's wealth was owned by 
not more than 1 per cent, of the people. 

But by 1900 this concentration had be- 
come greatly accentuated. Mr. Sanial's 

[64] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

estimate for that year puts the plutocratic 
class at nine-tenths of 1 per cent, of the 
numbers engaged in gainful occupations, 
and gives it 70.5 per cent, of the total wealth. 
But the plutocratic class as a whole con- 
tains many persons of wealth who are not 
engaged in gainful occupations; and an 
estimate for this additional wealth brings 
the aggregate for 1900 to 75 per cent, of 
the total. To-day we have to account for 
ten more years of this uninterrupted move- 
ment of concentration, in a time of great 
wealth production. We shall not go far 
astray in estimating an addition to the 
wealth of this 1 per cent, of the population 
which brings its present possessions to 
85 per cent, of the total. 

The workers, as a class, got little, if any 
part, of this increase. The nominal wages 
of the skilled workers are higher, the actual 
wages of all workers, skilled and unskilled, 
are lower than they were in 1890, probably 
lower on the whole than they were in 1886. 
No one will accuse the statisticians of the 
Labor Bureau of an undue pessimism. But 

5 [65] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the best they can do in the Bulletin for July, 
1908, is to show an average weekly wage 
in 1907 of £1.2 per cent, above that of 1890. 
This, mark you, is for the manufacturing 
industries, including the most skilled and 
the best organized workers. No one sup- 
poses the common laborers, clerks and the 
like to have made any such gain. It is a 
matter of common observation that the 
wages of clerks are rather less than more 
than they were twenty years ago. The 
same thing is true of salesmen in stores, 
and is probably true of common laborers. 
But this increase of wages, restricted as 
it is to but a part of the working class, must 
suffer a considerable reduction. The same 
issue of the Labor Bulletin gives the increase 
in the retail prices of food, weighted ac- 
cording to family consumption, as 17.8 per 
cent, for the same time. Since then prices 
have been almost steadily rising. Brad- 
street's for December 11, 1909, stated that 
the increase since June 1, 1901, had been 
23 per cent. The figures do not of course 
include rent, which has risen enormously, 

[66] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

nor certain other necessities. The showing 
does not accord with the theory of increased 
distribution of wealth among the workers. 
There has been no such increased distribu- 
tion. There has been, instead, increased 
concentration. 

The census figures on paupers in alms- 
houses show an absolute increase, though 
a relative decrease, in twenty years. But, 
as the census bulletin remarks, the figures 
indicate very little regarding the extent of 
privation. The better classification of de- 
pendents, which now distributes many of 
them to institutions other than almshouses; 
the differing provisions regarding paupers in 
the various States ; and the general effect of 
private charity, which saves a great many 
paupers from institutions — are factors which 
make comparisons of these figures futile. 

The figures on farm mortgages, farm 
tenantry and proletarian unemployment are 
also indecisive. The movement of farm 
mortgages is not a final indication of any- 
thing. Some men mortgage their property 
because they are poor, and some because 

[67] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

they want to buy more property. It may 
be conceded, too, that the frightful showing 
of unemployment in the 1900 census has 
been corrected to some extent by increased 
employment (except during the panic time, 
1907-08) since then. But it is not so easy 
to concede the contention made by Dr. 
Henry C. Taylor, in his work on Agricul- 
tural Economics, that the great increase 
of farm tenantry is rather an indication of 
prosperity than the reverse. To consider all 
these figures adequately would take us too 
far afield. It is sufficient to point out that, 
on the showing of data about which there is 
less dispute, the practical things done by 
you these last twenty years have not per- 
ceptibly impeded the tide of wealth con- 
centration or lightened the general lot of 
the poor. 

Well, there are the railroads. No prob- 
lem of to-day has been so constantly a sub- 
ject of discussion, of private proposals and 
of legislative enactments. Twenty-three 
years ago the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission was established, and since that 

[68] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

time the subject of railroads has been almost 
uninterruptedly before every legislature, 
every Congress and every social and eco- 
nomic convention. One of the main objects 
always aimed at was the abolition of dis- 
criminating rates against the "little fellows." 
And what has been the result ? The report 
of the United States Industrial Commission 
(1901) declares: "There is a general con- 
sensus of opinion among practically all 
witnesses, including members of the 
Interstate Commission, representatives of 
shippers, and railway officers, that the 
railways still make discriminations between 
individuals, and perhaps to as great an 
extent as before." And again: "It is 
thought generally that there has been a 
considerable improvement in the situation 
during 1899. . . . Many witnesses, however, 
including representatives of the railroads, 
think that the improvement is only tempo- 
rary, and that, when the present rush of 
traffic has ceased, discriminating rates will 
be granted more and more." Professor 
Frank Parsons, in his The Heart of the 

[69] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

Railway Problem (1906), comments upon 
this declaration as follows: "The investiga- 
tions of the last five years show that these 
witnesses were right in thinking the cessation 
of hostilities to be only a temporary truce." 
The Interstate Commerce Report for 1905 
is still complaining about violations of the 
law, declaring that rebates are unquestion- 
ably paid and that unjust preferences are 
given by other methods. Since then it 
has been officially asserted that the giving 
of rebates has practically ceased. Is the 
assertion true? Men who claim to know 
the situation declare that the only change 
is in the greater subtlety by which the law 
is evaded. And has the creation of the 
Commission resulted in benefiting the small 
shipper? A prominent independent oil re- 
finer said to me recently that probably not 
a single person has ever complained to the 
Commission without subsequently regretting 
his action. For what the railroads and the 
Standard Oil Company did to the aggrieved 
person previous to his complaint was mere 
child's play to what they did afterward. 

[70] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

Is the railroad situation more satisfactory 
in its other phases? Is the manipulation 
of railroad properties less easy or less 
frequently resorted to? Is the watering of 
stocks to the saturation point less common ? 
Have the abuses of the private car graft 
been curtailed ? He would be an optimistic 
person who would answer "yes." 

How is it with railroad casualties ? The 
interstate roads reported for the year ended 
June 30, 1909, 8,722 persons killed and 
95,626 injured. This is not their highest 
record, but it will do for comparison. This 
casualty list, it should be noted, is greater 
in the number killed than that suffered by 
both contending armies at both the bloody 
battles of Stone River and Gettysburg, and 
greater in the number wounded than that 
suffered by both armies at Antietam, Freder- 
icksburg, Stone River, Chancellorsville and 
Gettysburg combined. 

Though the ten-year period, 1895-1905, 
witnessed an almost steady increase in the 
ratio of casualties to passengers carried, 
a marked improvement has been shown in 

[71] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

figures for 1908 and 1909. But the casualty 
rate for employes is steadily worse. In 
1895 one employe was killed for every 
433 employed; the average for the three- 
year period, 1906-08, was 1 in 393. In the 
earlier year one was wounded for each 31 
employed; the average for 1906-08 was 1 
in 19; the figure for 1908, 1 in 17. Or take 
the employes known specifically as train- 
men. The safety-appliance act was passed 
for their benefit, and in 1908 it had been to 
some degree in operation for fifteen years. 
Yet in the earlier year one trainman was 
killed for each 155, as against one for each 
133 in 1906-08, and one wounded for each 
11 in the earlier year as against one for each 
8 in the later period. 

It would thus not appear that any of 
your multifarious efforts toward reform 
has greatly lessened the ratio of casual- 
ties among railroad employes. How is it, 
then, with general industrial casualties? 
Unfortunately, we have here less reliable 
figures for comparison. We are beginning 
to learn something about the number of 

[72] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

casualties to-day, but our comparison with 
the past decade or two is largely confined 
to guesswork. We have the undeniable 
record of increased killing and maiming 
on the railroads; and a general though not 
uniform increase in the mines. The in- 
crease of general industrial casualties is 
hardly an arguable point, since no one 
regardful of his reputation would dispute it. 
We know that to-day we are destroying 
lives at a rate about the same as that main- 
tained during the Civil War. The com- 
putation of Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman, 
the statistician of the Prudential Life Insur- 
ance Company, estimates a fatal-accident 
rate in the United States of from 80 to 85 
in 100,000. On a basis of 90,000,000 popu- 
lation, this would mean from 72,000 to 
76,500 killings. The serious woundings he 
puts at 1,600,000. But the fatal-accident 
rate for the entire registration area as given 
in the census of 1900 is 90.3. This would 
mean 81,270 killings yearly. Admitting 
that not more than 80 per cent, of these 
should come under the head of industrial 

[73] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

accidents proper, we should still have a 
yearly total of 65,016. The Civil War did 
but little, if any, worse than this in actual 
killings and mortal woundings, while in 
mannings and in disablements through dis- 
ease it furnished a record that is paltry 
in comparison with that made by our present 
industrial system. It would seem that we 
shall have to look elsewhere for evidence 
of the solid progress made toward more 
ideal social conditions by following the 
practical policy of one step at a time. 
Where else shall we look? 

Something has indubitably been done in 
reducing the death-rate. This is a doubtful 
gain if social conditions are to remain as 
they are. For no philosopher who includes 
happiness in his list of goods desirable for 
humanity can deem it well that a child 
should be rescued from death in order to 
drag its wretched being through the hell 
of industrial life as we know it to-day. Yet 
let us take this thing as a gain, and see what 
it is. As Dr. John Shaw Billings points 
out, the improvement is almost wholly due 

[74] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

to the better nourishing of children and 
the better treatment of their diseases. The 
reduction is marked in tuberculosis, of 
course; and persons of all ages have tuber- 
culosis. But the losses from pneumonia, 
cancer, heart disease, apoplexy and other 
diseases of adulthood and senescence are 
generally greater. It is a virtual consensus 
among life-insurance actuaries that in fifty 
years there has been no prolongation of 
adult life. In other words, all the benefits 
of science, all the benefits of an increasing 
observance of common sense in physical 
conduct — the application of India rubber 
to clothing, the improvement of food, the 
bettering of ventilation, the greater addic- 
tion to life in the open air — all these changes, 
and others besides, have been counterbal- 
anced by the increased strain and danger 
of modern competitive life. 

This fiercer battle certainly increases the 
number of the insane. Much has been done 
for these unfortunates: better treatment is 
accorded them, and an increasing number 
of hospitals is built for their accommoda- 

[75] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

tion. But the number of the insane in- 
creases at a frightful rate. We had 40,942 
insane in 1880, we had 74,028 in 162 hos- 
pitals in 1890, 150,151 in 328 hospitals in 
1900. The total insane in and out of 
hospitals was 170 per 100,000 in 1890; the 
total in hospitals only, 186.2 per 100,000 
in 1900. In fifty years the increase has 
been 300 per cent. 

There has been some progress in reducing 
illiteracy. But this, too, is a questionable 
good, if other social conditions are to remain 
as they are. It cannot be any advantage, 
in any tolerable scheme of things, to educate 
a child only to make it more conscious of 
its inescapable misery. But, even assuming 
education to be a good in all times and 
under all circumstances, the figures are 
hardly encouraging. Their clearest indica- 
tion is that illiteracy is decreasing most 
largely through the dying-off of the negro 
slaves, who were rarely permitted to learn 
to read, and that in their place is an increas- 
ing number of negro children who can 
barely read. 

[76] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

It is true there has been in twenty years 
a marked reduction relative to population 
in native white illiterates. Yet in ten 
years illiteracy has increased relative to 
population in the large cities of New York, 
New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island 
and Oregon, and in the small cities and 
country districts of Arizona, Connecticut, 
Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, Okla- 
homa and Wyoming. There are still 
6,180,869 persons at least ten years of age 
who are illiterate — a number only 59,889 
less than that of twenty years ago. But 
the real figures are missing from the census 
tables — the figures which would show the 
extent and degree of education. Those 
who have investigated the matter of the 
ages at which children leave the public 
schools know that there is a relative loss 
in the amount of schooling given to the 
children of the working class. 

The figures of the average daily attend- 
ance in the Chicago schools for the year 
1902-03 show 44,623 pupils for the first 
year. Every year there is a drop of about 

[77] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

5,000, only 10,928 being found in the eighth 
year. And how many do you suppose are 
found in the twelfth year — that is, the fourth 
year of the high school ? A poor remnant 
of 1,306. Making all allowances for the 
smaller number of children in the first grade 
twelve years earlier, there would still be a 
falling away of about 95 per cent. These 
children who dropped out did not die. The 
mortality rates for children from six to 
seventeen show that death could not have 
claimed more than 4,500 of them. They 
dropped out to go to work. The figures 
of other cities, in so far as they can be 
gathered, show the same conditions. In 
1903-04, in 46 cities, there were 196,506 
children in the first grade; there were but 
8,232 in the twelfth. The figures are 
eloquent with meaning as to the progress 
of education. 

Under the stress of the prevailing struggle 
the children of the workers are forced out 
of the schools to become wage-earners. 
Child labor becomes a greater and greater 
menace. Here is another field wherein a 

[78] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

thousand activities have engaged to correct 
a great evil. National, State and local 
committees have been formed, funds have 
been raised, appeals to the Christian spirit 
of the people have been made, and an 
onlooker would be led to think that the 
employment of children would speedily be 
terminated. But in 1880 the 1,118,356 
child workers formed 16.8 per cent, of the 
child population, while in 1900 the 1,750,178 
workers formed 18.2 per cent, of the child 
population. The 1905 census of manufac- 
tures shows a slight decrease in the number 
of child workers, it is true. But manufac- 
tures proper include but a very small part 
of the fields wherein children are employed. 
And the reduction here, in all likelihood, is 
for a cause analogous to that which brought 
about the decline of chattel slavery in the 
Northern States — the decreasing profit, in 
certain occupations, of child labor. 

The number of women in industry also 
increases. The increase since 1880 has 
been 2,479,642, or 105.3 per cent. Women 
workers formed 16 per cent, of the total 

[79] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

female population above sixteen years of 
age in 1880; in 1900, 20.6 per cent. It is 
notable that the largest share of the increase 
in the last decade from the standpoint of 
race and nativity was in the class of native 
white women of native parentage. These 
increased in number 514,542, or 39.3 per 
cent. Married women in industry increased 
by 260,800, or 50.4 per cent.; widows, by 
227,665, or 36.1 per cent. These figures 
mean, of course, an increasing disintegra- 
tion of family life. It cannot be said, either, 
that on the whole the lot of women in indus- 
try has been lightened. There has been 
considerable factory legislation and some 
legislation aimed at the department stores. 
But the factory legislation has been largely 
futile, and the refusal of the courts to pro- 
tect women in the matter of hours of work 
has increased their burdens. Moreover, no 
one at all conversant with the department 
stores in New York City, for instance, will 
dare to assert that since the passage of the 
Andrews bill in 1895 the treatment accorded 
women employes has as a whole improved. 

[80] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

The difficulty of organizing industrial 
women makes possible the heaping upon 
them of a thousand abuses; and nothing 
that you reformers have done or can do in 
the matter is likely to better their condition. 
Try, if you will, the task of organizing a 
campaign in behalf of women employes in 
department stores. Right at the start you 
will find yourselves obstructed by the ab- 
solute refusal of every metropolitan news- 
paper to mention, under any circumstances, 
anything in the remotest way tending to 
discredit these stores; and if, in spite of 
this obstacle, you attempt to proceed, you 
will find yourselves obstructed along a 
hundred paths by powers commercial, legal, 
juridical, social, and possibly even ecclesi- 
astical. 

If general social conditions have improved 
under the cumulative effects of your earnest 
efforts these last twenty years there should 
be less need for benevolent institutions. 
Yet in the thirteen years 1890-1903, 2,004 
of these were founded — an increase of very 
nearly 100 per cent. It can hardly be 

6 [81] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

contended that they were founded and have 
been maintained solely to give employment 
to mechanics and attendants; and the only 
other cause for this increase is that it reflects 
what is considered to be a rapidly growing 
social need. 

Then, too, if you practical men have 
added anything in the last twenty years 
to the joys of living, the 9,000 or 10,000 per- 
sons who will destroy themselves during 
the coming year would doubtless be glad 
to hear of it. And, if you have added any- 
thing to the security of human life from 
deliberate attack, the news will be exceed- 
ingly welcome to the 8,000 or 9,000 persons 
destined to be murdered within the next 
365 days. According to the careful figures 
of the Chicago Tribune, the number of 
suicides increased from 1885 to 1903 more 
than five times as fast as the population. 
The yearly average for the three years 
1881-83 was 688; for the three years 1904- 
06, 9,782, or fourteen times as great. Mur- 
ders and homicides have also increased at 
a frightful rate. The mean for the three 

[82] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

years 1881-83, was 1,477; for the three 
years 1904-06, 9,015. Some of this increase 
may be apparent only, due in some degree 
to the less efficient news service of the 
Tribune twenty-five years ago. But the 
increase from a later time, say 1890, is, 
with the exception of four abnormal years, 
1894-97, rapid and fairly regular. 

The computable benefits of your policy 
are hardly observable here. Where, then, 
must we look for evidence? Frankly, it 
would be difficult to say. You have insti- 
tuted the initiative and referendum in a 
number of places, but the results in im- 
proved legislation and in the elimination 
of graft have not been wholly convincing. 
You have passed some inheritance laws, but 
their effect on the poverty of the mass and 
on the concentration of wealth eludes the 
sharpest eyes. You have passed a national 
contract-labor law, and it is violated all the 
time. The successive irrigation and reclama- 
tion measures have doubtless been more 
fruitful of observable benefits to a part of 
the people and a part of the country than 

[83] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

any other work that has been done; but 
whatever local blessings have come from 
them, it remains to be proved that they have 
had the slightest degree of influence on the 
general state of social conditions. Some 
general social benefit has indubitably been 
gained from the passage of the pure-food 
law. We are not so elaborately poisoned 
to-day as we were four years ago. But a 
pure-food law is one of those fundamental 
necessities which come, like manhood suf- 
frage and popular education, because they 
cannot be withheld. The poisoning of food 
and drink is an evil from which all suffer — 
workers, retainers, "middle class," and to 
some extent magnate class. The struggle 
for a pure-food law does not involve a con- 
test solely between working class and capital- 
ist class; and the enactment of such a law 
has therefore been possible. No one sup- 
poses this law to be as rigorous or as com- 
prehensive as it should be; and no one 
supposes that it is being enforced as it 
should be. As a matter of fact, it is to a 
considerable extent violated and evaded all 

[84] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

the time. But the law itself may be con- 
ceded to be a positive social gain. And 
that is about the record of reformation, 
as far as is to be seen. 

In his recent work on Pragmatism, the 
late William James quotes with approval 
a passage from Mr. Gilbert K. Chester- 
ton, as follows: "There are some people 
— and I am one of them — who think that 
the most practical and important thing 
about a man is still his view of the universe." 
And Professor James adds, addressing one 
of his audiences: "You each have a philos- 
ophy. . . . The most interesting and im- 
portant thing about you is the way in which 
it determines the perspective in your several 
worlds." 

We, too, say, "The most interesting and 
important and practical thing about you is 
your view, not of the universe, but of the 
planet — your philosophy of history — your 
interpretation of social events, past and 
present." You may have a purely ideal- 
istic philosophy — you may think that social 
changes are the result of notions got from 

[85] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

heaven knows where of what should be 
and what should not be. You may have 
the great-man theory, that social changes 
are the result of the interposition of wise 
or forceful men in the affairs of people and 
nations; and you may, in the midst of your 
very practical efforts, lay the flattering 
unction to your souls that you are yourselves 
among the great and wise. You may have 
any one of a half-dozen such interpretations, 
and whatever one you cling to will of course 
affect your attitude and your conduct with 
regard to social changes. 

But one social interpretation alone ex- 
plains the riddles of history. The solution 
of the problems of physical science accords 
no more closely with the hypothesis of 
evolution than does the solution of social 
problems accord with this hypothesis. It 
is the economic interpretation of history, 
with its inescapable corollary of the class 
struggle. The futility of your efforts these 
many years is explained by this interpreta- 
tion, and it is explained by no other. 

Year after year you devote your labors to 

[86] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

one after another of many specific aims. 
But you are unable to show visible results 
for your toil. Thwarted in one endeavor, 
you as eagerly turn to another. But always 
and everywhere the results for you are about 
the same. You succeed in few, if any, in- 
stances in adding a single good to the gen- 
eral mass of mankind. 

And why are your efforts so uniformly 
barren of achievement? They are futile 
because you refuse to recognize the terms 
and conditions of the social struggle. The 
struggle fundamentally is not against indi- 
viduals, no matter how evil they may be. 
It is not fundamentally a struggle to termi- 
nate this or that incidental privilege or power 
which certain individuals or groups have 
seized. It is a struggle against a class as 
the representative and chief support of a 
brutal economic system, and its meaning 
is the abolition of that system. The nature 
of the struggle is for the time somewhat 
obscured by the desperate protest of the 
"middle class" against extinction. But the 
real underlying factors of that struggle are 

[87] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the movement of general economic processes 
to their culmination, the awakening aggres- 
sion of the working class against private 
ownership, and the stubborn determination 
of the ruling class to yield no point. The 
chimeras which you insist upon fighting, 
and which you name variously, each man 
after his wont, as Monopoly or Special 
Privilege or Discrimination, are merely the 
projected shadows of this great power, the 
ruling class. It is a class fortified in ma- 
terial possessions, in law, in administration, 
in ecclesiastical and educational institutions, 
and yet more in the awe and terror which 
it inspires and the subservience which it 
compels in ministers, educators and poli- 
ticians, as well as in the common mass. 
It cannot be successfully combated by 
guerrilla attacks waged against shadows. 
From its well-nigh impregnable fortifica- 
tions it laughs at your desultory warfare. 
A Socialist vote of one million in a national 
election would jar it to its inmost recesses, 
and cause it to offer a hundred concessions 
of one sort or another. But nothing that 

[88] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

you are likely to do or say will cause it to 
offer a single concession. To what it has it 
holds on with an iron grip, and it means 
never to let go. The capitalist class can be 
successfully combated only by another class 
overmatching it in numbers, in unity and 
in determination. 

When we say this capitalist class can be 
overthrown only by another class, we mean 
a class opposed to it in instincts, in interests 
and in aims. The poor, demoralized and 
disintegrating faction popularly known as 
the "middle class," which is now in active 
rebellion against its more successful partners, 
cannot do it. It has not the numbers, it has 
not the material power, it has not the funda- 
mental opposition of interests. This class 
is suffering a constantly narrowing scope 
of action and a decrease of revenue. It 
blindly protests against the increasing dom- 
inance of the big capitalists, and it wants 
instituted a measure of restriction upon 
wealth-getting which will give it a better 
chance to compete. 

But the members of this class, however 

[89] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

they may oppose trusts and corporations, 
are a unit on the preservation of the reigning 
order. They have an equal appetite to 
that of the magnates for rent, interest and 
profit; and in opposing the magnates they 
reveal only a desire for a larger share of the 
surplus. In defense of the existing system 
the petty trader will shed his heart's blood, 
or in extremity even his money, as freely as 
will the greatest of magnates. He will con- 
sent gradually to municipal ownership, and 
even to national ownership, only as he 
becomes firmly convinced that any share in 
the private ownership of utilities is impossi- 
ble to himself and his fellows. But all the 
other avenues of exacting rent, interest and 
profit, he wants left open, that he may 
batten upon them at will. The reform for 
which he clamors is the putting of a handi- 
cap on the man who plays his own game 
more successfully than can he. 

The source of virtually all opportunist 
measures is this "middle class," or the 
individuals or groups hanging upon its 
flanks and accepting its ethical standards. 

[90] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

Every such measure is doomed to failure, 
just as the class itself is doomed to extinction. 
The inexorable processes now at work, 
which in spite of unceasing clamor and of 
heroic opposition have lodged virtually nine- 
tenths of the nation's wealth in the hands of 
a class numbering with its families less than 
a million persons, will go on to their culmi- 
nation of a complete absorption of wealth, 
unless checked by the working class, fight- 
ing under the banner of Socialism. Those 
processes cannot be stayed, they cannot be 
broken down, by your desultory attacks 
upon so-called "lines of least resistance." 
There are no points of least resistance in 
the fortifications of this class; what seem 
so are merely the ambushes or quicksands 
into which you are lured and wherein your 
efforts are swallowed up and lost. There 
are no short cuts, there is no royal road, 
to the goal. The Socialist way is the long 
way, but it is the only way. And in per- 
petually seeking by-paths to victory instead 
of taking places in the ranks, you are but 
repeating the actions of those unprosperous 

[91] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

adventurers of the early days on this Conti- 
nent who sought the North-west Passage 
in every creek and inlet, or who loaded their 
vessels with iron pyrites for gold, when they 
should have been aiding in the work of 
building up the colonies. 

This giant power, the capitalist class, has 
its ramifications everywhere. At some time, 
at some place, in your efforts, you come 
squarely against it in one form or another, 
and you cannot make a further move. You 
are checkmated, and you wonder why. It 
is because this power, sure of itself and 
unapprehensive of harm from you, is de- 
termined to concede to you nothing that is 
of value to itself. What it concedes, exam- 
ine, and you will find a Greek gift. You 
think you have won a victory when you 
have succeeded in passing some trifling 
measure of restriction. But a year or five 
years later you find that the very evils you 
had supposed corrected have continued 
unchecked. The measures of reform which 
you sometimes enact it immediately turns 
to its own advantage. Or when in those 

[92] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

rare cases, by the kindly interposition of 
Providence, some measure of yours is per- 
mitted actually to stop a certain form of 
exaction, you find that new and greater 
exactions have broken out in a score of 
other places. This power is greater than 
legislatures or courts, greater than even the 
most strenuous of executives. It is insatiate 
in its desire, and it has no fear of anything 
in heaven or on earth but the Socialist 
movement. 

The class destined to overthrow this 
capitalist class is already on the field, and 
is slowly forming itself into militant array. 
We Socialists are its vanguard and its 
drill-masters, and carefully, earnestly, but, 
alas! not always patiently, we are bringing 
it forward and whipping it into shape for 
its appointed work. Unfortunately, it is 
cursed with ignorance, timidity and moral 
inertia. It is unsophisticated, and is sus- 
ceptible alike to the wiles of cajolery and 
to the panic of fear. Its instincts are just, 
but it is as yet too timorous to trust fully 
the validity of its instincts. It still mistakes 

[93] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

benevolence for justice. It still looks to its 
smooth-spoken enemies and to its faint- 
hearted friends for advice. Its mood alter- 
nates between credulity and suspicion, for 
it is attracted by false lights and it is usually 
betrayed. 

But this class, for all its present defects, 
has vast latent powers of self-reformation 
and upbuilding. It learns by experience — 
a thing the ruling class rarely does; and 
its experiences in this day of capitalist 
supremacy are of a sort which tend ever to 
give it a better understanding of its environ- 
ment, a closer unity, a greater determination 
and a higher ideal of its mission. From 
every repulse it returns upon itself, gaining 
new strength and a riper knowledge. Year 
by year it sees more clearly the futility of 
its earlier modes of warfare and comes 
more generally to accept the tactics of 
its Socialist vanguard. There are moment- 
ary reactions from this tendency here and 
there, but the whole movement of the work- 
ing class throughout the civilized world is 
increasingly toward Socialism. 

[94] 



TO THE REFORMERS 

It is now time that you men of earnest 
purposes and of great energies, who have 
yet spent your lives in endeavors barren of 
result, should recognize these truths. You 
may find it pleasanter to dwell in the palace 
of illusions, and to think that efforts such as 
yours must be efficacious, no matter what the 
unalterable records say. But, if you are 
willing to face the facts, and willing also 
to place yourselves where your efforts will 
count for most; if you are willing to re- 
nounce the praise of capitalist retainers 
that you, as opposed to the visionary Social- 
ists, are "safe, sane and conservative," 
then you will forswear your past affiliations, 
and enlist with this great international 
movement, the arbiter of the future. 



[95] 



CHAPTER III 



TO THE RETAINERS 



You retainers and servitors of the men 
of wealth — you who from rostrum, pulpit 
and sanctum, from bar and bench, defend 
the existing regime and oppose the struggles 
of the working class for a better life; you 
whose business it is to find a practical, a 
juridical, an ethical and even a spiritual 
sanction for things as they exist, and who 
voice the cheap moralities which are the 
reflex of the interests of the class that em- 
ploys you — there is a word to say to you 
which needs to be spoken. Upon those 
who take part in the forward movement of 
the time no more pressing duty is laid than 
that of telling you in plain words what 
millions of men are thinking of you. 

You are honest in that your expressions 
are the direct results of your means of mak- 

[96] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

ing a living. You serve, as your intellectual 
forebears have ever served, as the expound- 
ers of the special moralities which the ruling 
class has ever sought to impose upon the 
ruled. But you are dishonest in that you 
do not acknowledge the class character of 
your teachings, and in that you seek to give 
a social and general sanction to what is 
purely an expression of the needs of your 
employers. "Wherever," says John Stuart 
Mill, "there is an ascendant class, a large 
portion of the morality emanates from its 
class interests and its class feelings of supe- 
riority." And as your predecessors formu- 
lated the interests of feudal baron or slave- 
holder into ethical precepts binding upon 
villein or slave, so do you formulate the 
interests of the capitalist class into an 
ethical code binding upon wage-earners. 

Yours is a servile ethics — an ethics handed 
down to you from above, to be disseminated 
among those below. You do not make 
discoveries in morality. Such discoveries 
are made for you. It is not until, in the 
gradual flux of conditions, the teaching 

[97] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

of a special morality comes to be necessary 
to the ruling class, that you learn what is 
moral and what immoral. 

How many of you ever realized that the 
"open shop" was eternally bound up with 
the True, the Good and the Beautiful until 
the recent collective reaction of the employ- 
ers against trade-unions forced it upon your 
attention? Might not the "heroism of the 
scab" have remained to you an unappre- 
hended virtue, a moral flower "born to 
blush unseen," if the general warfare against 
the unions these last few years had not 
forced you to a recognition of the strike- 
breaker's value to the factory lords? You 
extol, in fervid phrase, the "right to work," 
and protest against its infringement. But 
does the real "right to work" ever 
touch your consciousness? That in 1900 
6,468,964 workers in gainful occupations 
were unemployed for more than one month; 
that nearly half of these were unemployed 
for from one to three months, and three- 
eighths of them for from four to six months, 
is small part of your distress. You have 

[98 J 



TO THE RETAINERS 

discovered only the evil of the unemploy- 
ment of that infinitesimal fraction who are 
prevented from displacing union men. The 
enormous volume, the intense degree, of 
privation which these figures reveal have 
little or no meaning for you. That millions 
of human beings may sicken and die through 
want of the barest comforts of existence is 
a consideration you leave to others. You 
are troubled only by that minor part of 
the problem which touches adversely the 
interests of your employers. 

You prate, too, of "violence." The 
frightful violence, indirect though it be, 
by which every year more than 60,000 beings 
are hurled to death and some 1,600,000 
seriously injured, is not what you mean. 
That the butchery of the Civil War is being 
repeated, year after year, throughout the 
industrial plant of the nation, does not move 
you. You preach no homilies upon this 
form of violence; you do not talk of it to 
your classes in economics; you give it 
small mention, if any, in your platitudinous 
editorials and in your pious sermons. Nor 

[99] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

are you moved by that other form of violence 
— though still more indirect, yet still more 
fatal — the forcing of human beings to work 
at tasks which kill slowly by poison, by 
disease or torture, instead of mercifully at 
a blow, and which annually claims an 
uncomputed army of victims. All this you 
pass by as the necessary and inevitable 
fortune of the poor, to be borne by them 
in patience. That is, when you notice it 
at all ; for many, if not most of you, habitu- 
ally shut your eyes and ears to the sufferings 
and cries of outraged humanity. 

But when you see or hear of a union 
workman attacking the man who has taken 
his job, all your latent indignation is awak- 
ened; you cry out in horror, and demand 
"a wall of bayonets from Washington to 
Wilkesbarre," or some other mode of instant 
and rigorous repression. The robbery, the 
torture and the slaughter of a race mean little 
to you, because these are the price which 
must be paid for the rent, interest and profit 
of the class which keeps you going. .But 
the incidental violence of the striker means 

[100] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

to you a crime against humanity, against the 
Almighty. Did you ever dig down into your 
inner selves to try to discover the reason 
why your indignation is spontaneously awak- 
ened by the one thing and not by the other ? 
It is safe to say that you never did. For 
then you would have discovered that it is 
because you have not developed a social 
conscience. You have only a servile class 
conscience. You absorb and reflect the 
interests, the instincts and the feelings of 
the class from which you draw your sus- 
tenance. And whenever the interests of 
that class are trenched upon, as when a 
workman is prevented from working more 
cheaply than another, you are shocked as 
by an electric current. 

You were long in awakening to the evil 
of child labor. Many of you are not yet 
awakened. Your forebears in England 
were equally obtuse, and they busied them- 
selves for years in inventing grave objec- 
tions to the proposed reforms. Nothing was 
better for young persons than work, they 
said. Education was on the whole harm- 

[101] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

ful for the children of the working class, 
because it tended to unfit them for the 
station which God and the factory lords 
had ordained for them. And idleness, even 
for the very young, was worse, since it 
made them the prey of vicious habits and 
engendered in them an ungodliness of heart. 
Many of you who live in the factory regions 
of the South are to-day repeating these old 
inanities. And for those of you who live 
in the North, you had best look and see if 
an economic cause is not back of your sud- 
den awakening. Until the needs of man- 
ufacturers in the North (where child labor 
has been restricted largely by the influence 
of labor unions upon legislation) demanded 
an interference with the cheaper production 
of the South, how many of you had ever 
troubled yourselves regarding this frightful 
evil ? Not many, and for that matter, not 
many of you are worrying about it even 
now. For, to the manufacturers and traders 
of the North the restriction of child labor 
is not an unmixed blessing. What is wanted 
is just enough legislation to bring about 

[102] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

an equilibrium between the cost of pro- 
duction in each of the two sections. It may 
go too far and seriously inconvenience the 
gleaning of profits. And so long as this 
is so, there is abundant motive for many of 
you keeping quiet. To such of you the 
whole industrial world may turn, pivoted 
upon a child's heart, while you, your "glassy 
essence" reflecting only the interests of your 
employers, remain serenely oblivious. 

No, you have small need and less inclina- 
tion to prosecute discoveries in social moral- 
ity. Your trade is rather to excuse or 
sanction the thing that is, to allay the unrest 
of the masses, and to denounce the " wicked 
agitators" who would fain awaken the 
people to a sense of their power. It is a 
good world, you say. Cautiously you admit 
that it is not what it might be; but if all 
would invariably do the right and proper 
thing, you say, all would be well. And so, 
by tongue and pen, you coax and persuade 
the toilers to keep at their plodding tasks, 
to bear with patience hunger and cold, 
illness and wounds, and the thousand priva- 

[103] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

tions which are their inescapable lot. Your 
employers must reap their rent, interest and 
profit. And how can they reap unless the 
masses sow ? 

The seditious and subversive agitators stir 
them to complain. But for each complaint 
you have a ready specific. Is life, as they 
say, under the sway of the prevailing regime, 
merely a game, a lottery, a universal Monte 
Carlo? Then "beat the game," you say. 
From your university chairs, your rostrums, 
your pulpits and your editorial desks, you 
blandly tell us, just as do the runners and 
"cappers" of a faro bank, that this or that 
plan or "system" will assuredly "do the 
trick." Now it is Morality, and now So- 
briety, now it is Faithfulness, and now 
Hard Work; now Thrift and now Efficiency. 
And though many of you know in your hearts 
that none of these things will do, yet still 
you proffer these counsels to the generations 
that toil and suffer and pass away and find 
no answer to the painful riddle of life. 

Not in Morality, as you preach it, does 
the working class find its salvation. For 

[104] . 



TO THE RETAINERS 

even in the best ages the sleets and snows 
of misfortune have fallen alike upon evil 
and good; while in the worst ages, given 
up to competitive and fratricidal strife, 
morality becomes a hostage given to for- 
tune, leaving the victory to be won only 
by the unscrupulous, the strong and the 
inhuman. Nor is Sobriety other than a 
trumpery counsel which blinds men's eyes 
to real wrongs. That men, and especially 
workingmen, might all desist from strong 
drink is a hope which all may justly hold. 
But that such abstinence would have other 
than the slightest effect upon the present 
distribution of the world's goods is delusion, 
or something worse. Faithfulness, as you 
mean it — an unquestioning devotion of the 
worker to the interests and aims of his 
employer — is not only not a virtue, but a vice. 
For it makes men partners in their own 
exploitation; it blinds them to the funda- 
mental antagonism of interest between them- 
selves and their employers. Let, indeed, the 
workman play the game fairly, as the game 
is played ; let him render a fair sum of efficient 

[105] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

toil for a prevailing rate of wages. Under 
the rules of the game he must always pro- 
duce by his toil a far greater value than he 
receives in wages, else capitalism could not 
endure for a moment. And the worker 
must accept the rules or he cannot take 
part. But to ask him to merge his interest 
in that of his employer is to ask of him 
a subservience which lowers him from the 
status of a free man to that of a serf. 

Nor is it by means of Efficiency, as you 
call it, that the salvation of the working 
class is to come. For by it you mean, not 
social efficiency, the ordering and regulating 
of the processes of production to make them 
most fruitful. You mean individual ef- 
ficiency, the sharpening of beak and claw 
for a more intensive and cruel warfare. 
Surely, though, this remedy has all the 
hollowness and futility of the others. Is 
efficiency possible to but a part of the race ? 
It must be so, since you are ever declaiming 
about the incompetent, who have none but 
themselves to blame for their poverty. 
Then efficiency can promise but a Presby- 

[106] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

terian sort of salvation — to the elect. Or is 
it attainable by virtually all? If so, what 
change would it work in the inequalities 
and privations of life? Small change, in- 
deed; for were we all the efficient equals 
of Mr. Morgan or Mr. Rockefeller, the 
rough work of the world would still have 
to be done, and the doers would have to 
be those who rightly, according to the 
doctrine, should be doing something better. 
And then did you ever consider the enor- 
mous and increasing disparity of numbers 
between wage-earners and bosses? There 
are, for instance, more than 1,450,000 rail- 
way men, and not 6,000 of these are general 
officers. If the 1,444,000 developed an 
efficiency equal to that of their superiors, 
would they then all become general officers ? 
Where are the places for them, and who 
would do the hard work ? Your " efficiency " 
is only a lure which you use to keep alive 
in the worker the credulous hope of individ- 
ual success. 

Nor is Thrift, nor is Hard Work, the way 
out. Millions of men have toiled faithfully 

[107] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

all their lives, and other millions have both 
toiled and saved, only to die in poignant 
want. The product of men's toil, and no 
less of their thrift, is drawn into other hands, 
and the workers close their lives in poverty. 
In London, where the processes of the 
capitalist system are allowed a virtual free 
play, one person in every four of the entire 
population dies on some form of public 
charity. In New York, where the struggle 
is in some measure modified, one person 
in every seven is buried in Potter's Field. 
And were it not for the intervention of 
private charity, of benevolent societies, of 
labor unions, and of political leaders, it is 
possible that the number of pauper burials 
would approximate that of London. To 
preach toil to men who have always toiled 
when they could, and who see before them 
only the pauper's grave, is a shameless 
mockery. And then did you ever stop to 
inquire where the work which you urge 
men to do is to come from? Do you not 
know that the needs of the present system 
require an ever-increasing army of the un- 

[108] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

employed ? And do you not know that the 
figures show incontestably this growing 
army? Or are you too fatuous in your 
service to your masters to study the figures 
and to learn their lesson ? 

No, none of the proffered "systems" 
will beat the game of the great industrial 
Monte Carlo. They have all been played, 
over and over again, and though here and 
there an individual winning is made, the 
masses remain plundered and poor. And 
the most conspicuous result of your ex- 
hortation and advice is to aid in keeping 
them so. 

Is life not only a game, but in its fiercer 
phases a battle, as the agitators say ? Is it 
true that thousands are struck down in death 
and hundreds of thousands put out of the 
fighting by wounds and disease? Then, 
say you, seek a safer place in the battle, 
exercise your freedom of choice, and avoid 
those occupations that are dangerous. Did 
you ever, even for a moment, put yourself in 
the worker's place that you might consider 
the degree of his choice ? Do you not know 

[109] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

that such is the pressure upon him that he 
must seek work where he can get it, what- 
ever the conditions? That for the bare 
chance of earning his bread he must often 
face hazards of maiming and death vastly 
greater than those of a soldier in the blood- 
iest of wars ? 

And if your own tasks were equally 
dangerous, could you meet the question 
with such easy complacence ? If during 
every year 1 out of every 8 of you were 
wounded, and 1 out of every 133 killed, 
would you not see the matter in a different 
light? These are the average figures of 
casualties among trainmen for the three 
years, 1906-08. Or suppose that only 1 in 
every 19 of you were wounded, and only 
1 in every 393 killed, would it not still be 
a lively question with you? These are the 
average figures for the million and a quar- 
ter railway employes for the same period. 
If you had to spend your working hours 
amidst unguarded machinery; if you were 
forced to breathe air clouded with metallic 
dust, or the fluff of cotton, silk or flax, or 
[no] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

the fumes of molten white lead, would you 
not find something seriously at fault with 
the existing regime of industry ? Doubtless 
you would not strike. For you have small 
sense of a community of interests with your 
fellows of like tasks, since virtually the whole 
range of your ethical feeling is but a reflex 
of the interests of the class above you. Nor 
would you have the moral courage for 
such an act. For you have a haunting fear 
of privation. The specter of poverty which 
the worker knows so well, which appears 
at his cradle and follows him all his days, 
and which he learns by familiarity to jest 
with and provoke, is to you a monster to 
be kept at the remotest distance. And so 
you would not tempt privation by a strike 
or by wild talk of social revolution. But 
you would humbly beg for better things. 
Did you ever pause to think of the debt 
you owe the workers? In a million fields, 
in a multitude of factories, in mines and 
forests, men, women and even little children 
are reaping and sowing, hammering and 
planing, gathering and piecing together the 
[ill] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

products which make the wealth of the 
world. From some part of this wealth, a 
little from each worker, are taken and as- 
sembled the mites that make the enormous 
fund which society puts aside for your 
maintenance. Though the state or the mag- 
nates are your immediate paymasters, you 
are in reality the 'pensioners of the working 
class. The workers toil at hard and bitter 
tasks that you may be employed at tasks 
which are light and congenial. They strive 
at toil which slowly warps and disfigures 
their bodies or poisons their veins; or with 
a frolic welcome they brave chances greater 
than those of a soldier in the field — and 
all that you may follow your pleasant 
vocations, well clad, well housed and 
secure from harm. Multitudes are chained 
to a deadening monotony of labor, rob- 
bed of all opportunity of initiative and 
of creative expression — labor which slowly 
darkens their minds and benumbs their 
souls — while to you are given the tasks 
in the products of which you may . en- 
shrine what is best in you. They grow 

[112] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

old before their time, and they die at 
half your age. Each of you will have 
seen, before you have passed your intel- 
lectual prime, two generations of toilers 
descend to the grave. The fruit of their 
toil has been gleaned by others, and to 
you has been given a bounteous share. 
All that you have is from them, and 
what return do you make for it? 

They do not begrudge you your easier 
lives, so long as they feel that you are render- 
ing a service to the race. The patient en- 
durance of the poor is no more the marvel 
of the world than is their devoted sacrifice. 
The workers realize, as none others can 
realize, what has been denied them, and 
they seek to secure it for their children. 
Every instinct which develops in them as a 
necessary outgrowth of their lot pleads for 
an infinite extension of social service. And 
wherever the instincts or ideals of the work- 
ing class have found expression through 
government, they have manifested them- 
selves in the amplest provisions for learning 
and the arts. "The republic has no use 

8 [113] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

for savants" was an apothegm of the petty 
bourgeoisie, never of the proletariat. 

But when they find you soothed with the 
"execrable complacence of your prosperity" 
and proud of your subservience to your 
capitalist masters, turning upon them and 
rewarding their toil for you with sleek 
counsels to be patient and to endure, their 
indignation bursts forth in a torrent. They 
hate, they despise you. Because you can 
be happy in your creative work, you counsel 
them to find pleasure in their monotonous 
and joyless tasks. Because in fashioning 
the things in which you may embody your 
heart and soul, and no less your material 
interests, you can work long hours, you 
urge them to give to their masters long 
hours at tasks in which they can feel no 
interest and which rob them of health and 
life. You do this because it is needful to 
your capitalist masters that you do it. 

So wholly are you centered in your tasks 
of serving your masters that you are in- 
hibited from developing a sympathetic im- 
agination. You cannot put yourselves in 

[114] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

the workers' places. You cannot compre- 
hend their lot, nor can you even apprehend 
their feeling. You are thus enabled in the 
same moment to disavow the debt you owe 
them and to 

"Insult, exult, and all at once, 
Over the wretched." 

What Lear felt on the wild heath, as he 
thought of the "poor, naked wretches," 
whose "houseless heads," whose "unfed 
sides," whose " loop'd and window'd ragged- 
ness" made them the sport and prey of the 
elements, never comes to you. The hum- 
bled king could moan out, 

"Oh, I have ta'en 
Too little care of this!" 

But you, complacent alike in your pros- 
perity and your subservience, can only turn 
upon them with angry impatience and 
counsel them to go to work and keep quiet. 

With what eager impulse and with what 
compliant will do you make yourselves the 
defenders of the present scheme of things 
and the assailants of the coming order ! Now 

[115] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

that in every civilized land the working 
class, sick of the reign of cruelty and wrong, 
is awakening to a consciousness of its power, 
and to a determination to ordain a fairer 
life, you take upon yourselves the mission 
to ridicule its aims and ideals, and to dis- 
credit its leaders. 

It is only the unsuccessful, you say, who 
attack our existing institutions. You can- 
not understand, such is your subservient 
complacence, that multitudes among this 
revolutionary working class are proud of 
their unsuccess and wear it as a badge of 
honor. Pray you, under the existing scheme 
of things, how many and what quality of 
men achieve "success," and what must they 
not do to achieve it? It is not, except in 
rare cases, probity, nor truthfulness, nor 
humaneness, nor fellow service, that wins 
this fallacious good. It is, in the majority 
of cases, grafting and lying, fawning and 
cringing, selfishness and brutality, restrained 
only by that Chinese ethical standard, the 
necessity of "saving your face," that give 
victory in the struggle. And the men who 

[116] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

are seeking the overthrow of this system 
disdain to make use of these means. They 
leave the function to you. They do not, 
like your bishops, lend their presence to 
Chambers of Commerce at banquet, and 
give to the gamblers in the world's wealth 
the benediction of divine favor. They do 
not, like your Boards of Foreign Missions, 
solicit the profits of law-breaking and theft 
for their propaganda, and promise an inter- 
cession at the throne of grace. They do 
not, like your college heads, prescribe the 
dainty punishment of "social ostracism" 
for the world's robbers, and then accept the 
fruits of the robbery, crying out from their 
gables, "Bring on your tainted money!" 
Nor do they, like your journalists, make 
themselves the servile lackeys of the ruling 
class; nor, like your economists, constitute 
themselves the secular priests of capital, 
perpetually renewing their character of 
"pests of society and persecutors of the 
poor." Many of them might be "success- 
ful" if they chose to do these things. 
Rather they choose, like Francis of Assisi, 

[117] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the bride Poverty, instead of the harlot Sue- 
cess. And so you are right in your statement. 
But you utter your own condemnation when 
you speak it. 

The thing which, as the structural basis 
of a fairer life, these men strive for — the 
common ownership of the means of pro- 
duction — you assail with sweeping con- 
demnation. Few of you, save for a select 
group among the teachers, have ever so 
much as considered the proposal. The 
identity of your thought, the virtual identity 
of your language, when you speak of it, 
shows unmistakably that you draw your 
pabulum from a common source. Most 
of you would, of course, assail it with equal 
virulence if you knew more about it; for 
your instincts and beliefs reflect the instincts 
and beliefs of your employers, and you feel 
and see as they. But knowing the subject 
no better than you do, you have only a com- 
mon stock of phrases which you employ in 
its condemnation. 

You prate of the folly and sin of "divid- 
ing up," willfully ignorant of the fact that 

[118] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

what these men propose is to terminate 
the enforced dividing up which everywhere 
prevails to-day, and to substitute the hold- 
ing of productive property in common. 
You prate of a certain "menace to woman," 
blinding yourselves to the fact that the 
salvation of woman is to be found alone in 
her economic security, and that under our 
present system, whether in wedlock or 
prostitution, women are bought in the open 
market like potatoes. Actually or feignedly 
you distress yourselves with the thought 
of the "coming destruction of the home," 
oblivious of that visible present devastation 
of the home, moral as well as material, that 
goes on increasingly and inevitably under 
the processes of capitalist accumulation. 

You are tenderly solicitous of liberty, too, 
and fearful that this revolutionary working 
class may ordain a universal slavery. What 
liberty has any part of the working class to- 
day? And what liberty, pray, have you, 
except the liberty of saying and doing what 
is expected of you by your masters? Few 
of you have any real concept of liberty. 

[119] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

You look upon it as only the absence of 
governmental restraint. The myriad re- 
straints upon freedom of belief, speech and 
action, and upon self-development, which 
are the inescapable results of an economic 
system wherein one small class owns all the 
machinery of production, do not occur to 
you. You make a fetish of the abstraction 
of liberty; the substance of liberty you do 
not know. You cannot see or understand 
that real liberty is a power, a capacity, 
mutually exercised and mutually secured. 
It is not a shadow, but a substance. "The 
restraints of Communism," as the younger 
Mill well said — and he was at the time no 
over-friendly judge — "would be freedom in 
comparison with the present condition of 
the majority of the human race." 
• You are fearful, too, of the assertion by 
the working class of the equal dignity of 
labor. You find beautiful beyond expres- 
sion the sentiment of Pippa's song: 

"All service ranks the same with God." 

Only you want all service to rank the 

[120] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

same, not with man, but with God alone. 
The mere suggestion that it should so rank 
with men is to you seditious and subversive 
of our glorious institutions. You are fear- 
ful no less of "confiscation." Yet now that 
chattel slavery has been abolished you can 
thrill — such of you as yet retain some resid- 
ual emotion and are not held to the mere 
"passionless pursuit of passionless intelli- 
gence" — at the sentiment of Emerson's 
lines : 

"Pay ransom to the owner, 

And fill the bag to the brim. 
Who is the owner ? The slave is owner 
And ever was. Pay him!" 

But these words, as you take care to 
know, express an ethical verdict on a past 
age. The economic sanction for the rob- 
bery of the slave has gone, and with it 
the moral sanction. No slave-holding class 
now dictates to you the special moralities 
which it is needful that you inculcate to 
the robbed. But let some irreverent person 
substitute the word "toiler" for the word 
" slave," and instantly you are shocked with 
[m] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

horror. "Confiscation!" you shriek, and 
every instinct of antagonism within you 
awakens. And why? Because, though 
there is no longer a slave-holding class to 
dictate to you your ethics, there is a ruling 
class of capitalist owners of the means of 
production, holding to you the relation of 
masters, and by the interests of that class 
your ethical standards are necessarily 
formed. 

For your lighter hours you have recourse 
to tawdry phrases that have grown thread- 
bare through eager handling. " You cannot 
make men rich by legislation," "you cannot 
make men good by legislation," "you will 
destroy initiative," "you will eliminate indi- 
vidual responsibility," "you will reduce 
everybody to a dead level," are some of 
these collocations of words. And how you 
plume yourselves upon your superior " culti- 
vation" as you look upon the "lower strat- 
um of society" and tell it what is good for 
it and what to avoid ! You do not choose to 
remember that in every age "cultivation," 
as manifested by your class, has been the 

[122] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

lackey of privilege and oppression; and 
that the learning which was made possible 
for »you by the toil and sacrifice of the 
workers, you have ungratefully used against 
them. You choose to forget that in every 
age your class has framed just the sort of 
formulas for reproof and exhortation which 
best accorded with the interests of the ruling 
class. The hollowness of your present 
phrases is but a characteristic of all the 
hortatory phrases of your class since first 
men enslaved their brothers and called upon 
priest and teacher to sanction the act. 

How solicitous you are regarding the 
maintenance of initiative! As if the whole 
progress of civilization had not been at- 
tended by a setting of bounds to the range 
of men's lower initiatives and the opening 
of fields for initiative on higher planes. 
And as if, furthermore, the impulse to action 
could never be anything else than the ex- 
pectation of getting something from your 
neighbor! The Levantine pirate, when 
piracy was abolished, felt just the sense 
of outrage from the restriction of his 

[123] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

freedom of action that the factory lord 
of to-day feels over a restriction in the 
hours of child workers. Initiative is born 
with man, as hunger and thirst and aspi- 
ration are born with him. The closing 
of the opportunity for initiating methods 
of plundering one another of the means of 
life will but set free the incentives of men 
to a wider range of nobler initiatives. 
You may notice, also, when you take time 
to think of it, that throughout this period 
of the restraining of men's initiatives the 
sense and degree of men's personal respon- 
sibility has steadily increased. 

And, then, how childish is your stock 
phrase regarding goodness and legislation. 
You seem not to understand how far from 
the purposes of the revolutionary working 
class is "legislation," as you mean it, order- 
ing men to be "good." But waiving this, 
your phrase evades the truth of what we 
know and you know, to be operative even 
within the untoward environment of a 
system that prompts men to do evil for gain. 
That small body of law which has a really 

[124] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

social function — that body of law which 
sets new restraints upon the brutal and 
fratricidal struggle among. men — is assuredly 
one of the decisive factors in moral develop- 
ment. For the restraints imposed by the 
law in one age become a basis of conscience 
in the next age. To at least this extent, 
if to no further, men are indubitably "made 
good by legislation." And last, you would 
do well, for at least two reasons, not to harp 
too assiduously on that other and twin 
phrase regarding legislation and riches. 
First, because it is not, as you seem to 
think, an argument against the aims of 
the workers, since they do not propose to 
"make men rich by legislation"; and, 
second, if you will but look more closely 
you will discover on every hand abundant 
proofs that under the present order thou- 
sands upon thousands of men are con- 
stantly being made rich by legislative pro- 
tection or connivance, and that among the 
direct beneficiaries of this legislative wealth- 
making are yourselves. 

And now, finally, how can you keep your 

[125] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

way, week by week, mouthing the phrases 
inspired in you by your masters, and forget- 
ful of your obligations to those who toil? 
Do you never feel a consciousness of in- 
gratitude when you think upon those by 
whose patient striving you are fed? Does 
an inner voice never speak to you of your 
subservience? Do you never start and 
draw back, if only for a moment, from your 
forced labor of mending your phrases, 
year by year, to make them accord more 
nearly with the newer needs of your masters ? 
When, twenty years ago, you preached 
unrestricted competition because that was 
the thing your masters demanded, you did 
not divine that among their needs to-day 
would be a moral and economic sanction 
for the limiting of competition, as in trusts 
and companies. Did you, when it came 
to making the shift, make it freely and 
gladly, without a qualm, or did you palter 
and hesitate, as one who would avoid an 
enforced duty ? 

And do you never grow tired with it all, 
and look upon it as a burden from which 

[126] 



TO THE RETAINERS 

you would be free? Is it an always pleas- 
ant lot to be doing only that which your 
masters desire of you? Do you recall 
Rossetti's "Jenny," and the question he 
asks of her and answers in the same breath; 

"For sometimes, were the truth confessed, 
You're thankful for a little rest, — 
Glad from the crush to rest within 
From the heart-sickness and the din, 

From shame and shame's outbraving, too, 
Is rest not sometimes sweet to you ? " 

Do you not sometimes tire of it all, and 
look out wistfully into that larger com- 
munion of life where service is not a mere- 
tricious and degraded pandering to the 
privilege and luxury of a few, but a render- 
ing of good to the human race? Do you 
not recognize that in the purposes of the 
master class, in so far as it takes any 
notice of you at all, you are but as the 
pathetic little Jenny in the hands of her 
master, 

"Who having used you at [its] will, 
Thrusts you aside, as when I dine, 
I serve the dishes and the wine " ? 
[127] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

Do you not sometimes wish to break 
clean from it all, and to merge yourselves 
in that universal movement that makes 
straight for the goal of human emancipa- 
tion? There is room for you when you 
shall have awakened to your better selves. 



[128] 



CHAPTER IV 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 



"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation 
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking 
her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle 
mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled 
eyes at the full mid-day beam." — Milton: Areopagitica. 

You do not like criticism, you hard-and- 
fast Socialists of a certain sort. That is, 
criticism directed against yourselves. You 
are somewhat overfond of criticism directed 
against others, and in this you indulge 
yourselves freely. Indeed, so much is there 
of sweeping and indiscriminate denuncia- 
tion in common Socialist print and speech 
that one might very well be led to define 
Socialism as a "criticism of life." But 
of self-criticism you are not fond; while 
of other persons' criticism you are generally 
resentful. Some forms of it you tolerate: 
One individual censures another, and one 

9 [129] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

group or faction exchanges with another 
the liveliest animadversions upon its con- 
duct or tactics. These interchanges of 
amenities you take as a matter of course. 
But the movement as a whole, with its ulti- 
mate aim, with its theories and assumptions, 
often with even its personal composition 
and its purely incidental and temporary 
features, you are prone to regard as sacred, 
and therefore beyond criticism. A Chris- 
tian devotee or a Mohammedan zeaiot 
could hardly be more unquestioning in 
his faith; and neither of these could more 
passionately resent the calling in question 
of the things of his belief. 

You speak of yourselves, with pride and 
assurance, as "scientific" Socialists. But 
is the spirit of rapt faith, of intolerance of 
disbelief and of resentment over criticism 
quite in accord with the scientific temper? 
Is not the scientific spirit more in accord 
with the eternal questioning of truth; the 
constant turning back upon conclusions 
already formed for new tests of their validity ; 
the hospitable welcoming of criticism from 

[130] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

all quarters; the swallowing up of regret 
at the destruction of cherished beliefs in 
the joy of new discoveries? No doubt 
faith and strong partisanship may accom- 
pany the inquiring mind. So thorough a 
scientist as Huxley could be an ardent 
advocate and propagandist of a cause. But 
such ardency is a reasoned ardency — a 
fervency of conviction based upon an un- 
biased questioning of realities; and when 
the realities show an altered meaning, 
faith changes with them and attaches itself to 
the new meanings. This is not your kind of 
faith. Yours is rather that theological cast, 
which having been dispossessed of its super- 
natural deities and dogmas, sets up material- 
istic ones in their stead. It is a faith which 
has its holy words and its fetishes and its 
taboos. It is a faith which fixes itself upon 
set terms, upon iron-bound phrases, from 
which it refuses to be dislodged, and the 
questioning of which it regards as a sort 
of sinning against the light. 

Now astronomers and chemists and math- 
ematicians are formed of the same poor 

[131] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

clay as ourselves; and yet they analyze 
and compare, they disagree and criticise, 
they overturn and destroy the achievements 
of one another in their eternal questioning 
of truth. But they seek and strive in com- 
parative tranquillity of spirit. No astron- 
omer quarrels with another for developing 
some new detail in spectrum analysis; no 
mathematician assails the orthodoxy of 
another for working out a hitherto baffling 
problem; and no chemist feels the truth 
blasphemed at the discovery by another 
of a new element. Each of these achieve- 
ments may have overturned or made un- 
stable some generalization previously ac- 
cepted as law; and yet each achievement 
is hailed as a contribution to the world's 
knowledge, and resentment against the 
investigator would be regarded as madness. 
These workers follow the scientific method. 
You do not. In your partisan fervor, 
though taking the scientific name, you 
forget its meaning and its obligations. 
No doubt the tendency of a propagandist 
movement must ever be to hold fast to 

[132] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

certain dogmas, as well as to traditional 
forms and practices. The converts are 
won by telling them that such and such 
things are eternally and unalterably true, 
and it is an embarrassing duty in after 
times to have to tell them that such things 
have been found to be not true, and that 
other things in their stead are true. There 
is an instinctive fear that the recasting of 
particular beliefs in the minds of the con- 
verts may undermine faith in the creed as 
a whole. Also, there are tired and limited 
brains to consider, which having laboriously 
learned one thing by rote, cannot well 
learn another. For the sake of the numer- 
ical integrity of the movement it is best 
to leave them with what they have rather 
than to risk a change. A hardening process 
sets in, and a supreme value attaches to 
orthodoxy and constancy of belief as the 
basis of the movement. The distrust of 
criticism is thus natural; the turmoil in 
the ranks of the German Social Democracy 
which followed the appearance of Eduard 
Bernstein's little book is a classic instance 

[133] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

of its manifestation. But though an ad- 
herence to dogma and a distrust of criticism 
are to some extent inevitable, they will, 
unless recognized and guarded against to 
the full, invariably result in retrogression. 
There must be free thought and free expres- 
sion, else the movement declines. And as 
for you, you must follow the scientific 
method, or renounce the scientific name. 

You forget that method, and you involve 
yourselves in many contradictions and 
absurdities of speech and action. You re- 
vive old fallacies and old shibboleths, and 
transforming them to your needs, make 
them an integral part of your creed. You 
denounce the jingoism of a nation, but you 
exalt the jingoism of a party and a class. 
The sentiment of fanatical patriotism, "My 
country, right if possible, but anyhow my 
country," you reject with scorn; but you 
substitute for "my country" the terms 
"my party" or "my class," and the jingo 
phrase becomes your slogan. You ridicule 
the sentiment of party "regularity" when 
it is held by Republicans and Democrats 

[134] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

and Prohibitionists, but you make it an 
ethical standard for Socialists. You recog- 
nize that when it is held by others it is a 
sentiment fraught with the grossest evil — 
that it means in effect the condoning and 
sanctioning, "for the good of the cause," 
of every vicious act that a group of design- 
ing men may commit. But for yourselves 
you transform it and make it a sacred prin- 
ciple. 

You ridicule the rapt devotion of Mor- 
mons and Mohammedans and Christians 
to the literal reading of their holy books, 
written many years ago; and you give your- 
selves with a greater devotion to a belief 
in the inerrancy of the words of a German 
prophet whom you sparely, if ever, read. 
You have learned to deride as " Utopian" 
certain views of the early Socialists as to 
the character and the methods of attaining 
the ideal state; and yet the Socialist state 
of your imagination you are prone to endow 
with utterly Utopian and preposterous fea- 
tures. 

Against all the teachings of experience 

[135] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

you not infrequently exalt fanaticism — so 
only that it is your kind of fanaticism — 
as a means of advancing your cause and 
therefore a moral good. Though you set 
great store by rigid and uncompromising 
tactics in your strife with the non-Socialist 
world, you are too prone to indulge in 
compromising tricks and devices in your 
factional strife within the movement. 
Though in your public appeals you some- 
times extol education, too often you mean 
by the word no more than conversion to 
party Socialism. More often you belittle 
real education as useless or even harmful; 
when it suits your purposes you incite 
proletarian against "intellectual"; you ap- 
peal to the lowest stratum of ignorance, 
and you insinuate and encourage a sus- 
picion of education and of educated men. 

You extol free thought and free speech, 
but often you deny that freedom in your 
own ranks. You have scornful and derisive 
words for what you call "capitalist moral- 
ity," forgetful that though each economic 
system develops its superficial code, the 

[136] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

fundamental ethical standards are an evo- 
lution through all time, and are no more 
the product of capitalism than they are of 
tribal communism or of feudalism, or of 
those intermediate systems known as house- 
hold economy and town economy. In 
your wholesale denunciation of capitalism 
you forget the lessons of history, and you 
ascribe to a passing economic system the 
prevalence of defects and evils in human 
nature which have persisted throughout the 
life of the race. You denounce the capital- 
ist class for its ruthless exercise of might, 
and yet in your message to the working 
class you often appeal, not to its sense of 
social justice, but merely to its consciousness 
of numbers and power. Not seldom you 
forget that Socialism is not merely for the 
Socialists, but for all men; and you distort 
the meaning of the class struggle into that 
of a medieval peasants' war — a revolt of 
one class to despoil and dominate another. 

You cannot achieve a millennial revolution 
by holding such concepts and employing 
such means. You are as one on a wrong 

[137] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

road, on a dark night, miles and miles from 
home, and headed the wrong way. You 
will need to dismiss your many fallacies, to 
harmonize your many contradictions be- 
tween precept and practice, you will need to 
orient yourselves and to retrace your steps 
before you can make headway toward your 
goal. 

Fortunately, in no place in the American 
movement are you often in the majority. 
More often, in most places, you are an 
inconsiderable minority. One who has 
been for more than twenty years in or about 
the movement cannot fail to bear testimony 
to the intelligent devotion, the disillusioned 
zeal and the reasonableness of attitude and 
conduct to be found within the ranks. But 
some of you are always present everywhere. 
You have always been present. The his- 
tory of the movement in America, with 
its frequent shifts and turnings, its factions, 
its warring at cross purposes, its heresy 
trials, its breakdowns and reorganizations, 
sometimes its bombastic declarations, its 
visionary efforts and its illusory aims, only 

[138] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

too truly pictures your presence at all times. 
It was evidently the belief of Horace Greeley, 
whose years of experience in the cause in 
its earlier days entitle his judgment to 
respect, that you would always be present 
in the future. Summing up the failure of 
the Fourierite communities, this is what 
he said: 

"A serious obstacle to the success of any 
Socialistic experiment must always be con- 
fronted. I allude to the kind of persons 
who are naturally attracted to it. Along 
with many noble and lofty souls, whose 
impulses are purely philanthropic, and who 
are willing to labor and suffer reproach for 
any cause that promises to benefit mankind, 
there throng scores of whom the world is 
quite worthy — the conceited, the crotchety, 
the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, 
the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, 
and the good-for-nothing generally; who, 
finding themselves utterly out of place and 
at a discount in the world as it is, rashly con- 
clude that they are exactly fitted for the world 
as it ought to be* These may have failed 
again and again, and been protested at 

* Italics mine. — W. J. G. 
[139] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

every bank to which they have been pre- 
sented; yet they are sure to jump into any 
new movement as if they had been born ex- 
pressly to superintend and direct it, though 
they are morally certain to ruin whatever 
they lay their hands on. Destitute of means, 
of practical ability, of prudence, tact and 
common sense, they have such a wealth of 
assurance and self-confidence that they 
clutch the responsible positions which the 
capable and worthy modestly shrink from; 
so responsibilities that would tax the ablest 
are mistakenly devolved on the blindest 
and least fit. Many an experiment is thus 
wrecked, when, engineered by its best mem- 
bers, it might have succeeded." 

It is not necessary to accept Greeley's 
sweeping judgment in all its implications. 
The Socialist movement is a movement of 
the oppressed. It welcomes as no other 
organization, spiritual or secular, welcomes, 
all those that labor and are heavy laden and 
weary of heart — all those who have felt 
most keenly the brutalizing effects of the 
present system and who yet retain a spirit 
of resistance. It would welcome as well 
the proletariat of the slums, but in them — 

[140] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

the most brutalized victims — the spirit is 
extinguished, and no appeal reaches them. 
Though, however, the Socialist movement 
seeks out and welcomes the disinherited 
and the dispossessed and the wrecks and 
cripples of this ghastly fratricidal war — 
the beings who might have been whole and 
sound under a better system — it ought to 
have no welcome for the unsocial — for the 
factious, the fanatical, the jealous, the 
selfish and the treacherous. Perhaps every 
movement has had its self-seekers, its dis- 
turbers, its fanatics and its demagogues. 
But it is the business of this most modern 
movement, this "heir of all the ages" in 
enlightenment, not to have them. This 
movement is not one for fostering individual 
self-interest, and it therefore has no place 
for self-seekers. It is a movement for peace 
and order and system and mutual restraint, 
and it therefore has no place for faction- 
breeders and disturbers. It is not a move- 
ment headed by some divinely inspired 
Mahdi with a supernatural message, and 
it therefore has no place for fanatics. It 

[141] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

is a movement not for flattering the pro- 
letariat, but for disciplining and educating 
the proletariat — for fitting it for power, in 
Marx's phrase — and it therefore has no 
place for demagogues. Yet in spite of its 
character and its mission, some of these 
men drift to it; and a good part of the time 
they exert an appreciable influence. 

You know all this, though you do not 
want the fact spoken abroad — though you 
want it only whispered among ourselves, 
or at most published only in our own period- 
icals, where, ridiculously enough, every 
interested person can read it just as well 
as if it had appeared in some capitalist 
periodical. But you forget that our move- 
ment, though in its narrower sense a class 
movement, is an appeal to man's sense of 
social justice. It is an appeal to all men — 
to the capitalist as well as to the workman; 
and though we do our main work among 
the working class, it is not because we are 
unwilling that the capitalist who accepts 
our principles should come to us, but 
because we believe that in most cases the 

[142] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

rich man's material interest blinds him to 
a sense of social justice. Our appeal is 
to all men, and our contest is carried on 
"in the open." We have no secrets, and 
we ought to have none, for we are best 
protected by having none. In proportion 
as our movement is open to the world the 
power of a capitalist organization to cripple 
it through spies and informers is lessened. 
It is possible that there are men in this 
movement who are put there and paid for 
being there by a capitalist organization. 
If so, however, they are not there because 
of secret information to be got, but because 
of their power to foment discord; and half 
the times you permit yourselves to become 
wildly excited over some fraudulent issue 
or some silly charge, it may be that you are 
playing the part of dupe to a capitalist 
agent. To repeat, we have no secrets. 
We cannot hurt our movement by describing 
it in plain terms to all men; we can hurt 
it most by ignoring its defects or by turning 
with blind and savage resentment against 
those that tell us the truth about ourselves. 

[143] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

There is that "demagogy of ignorance", 
upon which from time to time you play, 
or with which you are played upon — that in- 
citement of proletarian against "intellect- 
ual," that scarcely disguised praise of 
fanatical ignorance. It will have to be 
extirpated, root and branch, and burned 
with fire, that its poisonous growth may 
no more be possible. How widespread is 
this demagogy, how harmful it is to the 
movement, may be indicated by quotations 
from two men who know the situation. The 
first is from the honored and beloved stand- 
ard-bearer of the Socialist party in America 
— Mr. Debs. It is taken from an article 
by him on the death of Thomas McGrady, 
published in the Appeal to Reason, Dec. 
14, 1907, and afterward reproduced in 
Mr. Debs' book. McGrady was a man 
who gave up the church for Socialism, and 
was afterward virtually hounded to his 
death — by men calling themselves Socialists. 
He had intellect, he had sympathy for the 
poor, he had enthusiasm for the cause. 
All that he had he gave. It was not enough. 

[144] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

"Certain 'leaders,'" writes Mr. Debs, 
"whose narrow prejudices were inflamed 
by the new agitator's success and increasing 
popularity in the movement, began to turn 
upon him and sting him with venomous 
innuendo or attack him openly through 
the Socialist press. . . . The cry was raised, 
'the grafter must go!' It was this that 
shocked his tender sensibilities, silenced his 
eloquent tongue and broke his noble and 
generous heart." 

Continuing, Mr. Debs writes: 

"There is a deep lesson in the melancholy 
and untimely death of Comrade Thomas 
McGrady. Let us hope that so much good 
may result from it that the cruel sacrifice 
may be softened by the atonement and 
serve the future as a noble and inspiring 
example. 

" While it is the duty of every member to 
guard the movement against the impostor, 
the chronic suspicion that a man who has 
risen above the mental plane of a scavenger 
is a 'grafter' is a besetting sin, and has done 
incalculable harm to the movement. The 
increasing cry from the same source that 

10 [ 145 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

only the proletariat is revolutionary and 
that ' intellectuals ' are middle-class reaction- 
aries is an insult to the movement, many 
of whose stanchest supporters are of the 
latter type. Moreover, it would imply by 
its sneering allusion to the 'intellectuals' 
that the proletariat are a brainless rabble, 
reveling in their base degeneracy and scorn- 
ing intellectual enlightenment. 

"Many a fine spirit who would have 
served the movement as an effective agitator 
and powerful advocate, stung to the quick 
by the keen lash in the hand of a ' comrade,' 
has dropped into silence and faded into 
obscurity. 

"Fortunately the influence of these self- 
appointed censors is waning. The move- 
ment is no longer a mere fanatical sect. It 
has outgrown that period in spite of its 
sentinels and doorkeepers. 

"Between watchful devotion, which 
guards against impostors and chronic heresy- 
hunting, which places a premium upon dirt 
and stupidity and imposes a penalty upon 
brains and self-respect, there is a difference 
wide as the sea. The former is a virtue 
which cannot be too highly commended, 
the latter a vice which cannot be too 
severely condemned." 

[146] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

The other quotation is from Mr. John 
Spargo, a Socialist who, in the service of 
the party, has traveled over the greater 
part of the United States, and whose 
writings are more widely read than those 
of any other American Socialist. It ap- 
peared in the New York Daily Call, Nov. 
14, 1909: 

"One of the most pernicious and deplor- 
able things in connection with the present 
situation in the party is the fact that self- 
seeking demagogues, with more or less suc- 
cess, make it their business to create artificial 
divisions in our ranks, and to foster hatred 
and suspicion where comradeship and trust 
are so necessary. Take, for example, the 
attempt to range the proletariat against the 
so-called 'intellectuals' in the party: Not- 
withstanding the fact that our capitalist 
enemies enlist all the best trained intellects 
procurable to serve their interests, especially 
by poisoning the fountains of knowledge 
and confusing the minds of the wage- 
workers, and the fact that their activity can 
only be met by equally well trained intel- 
lects devoted to the Socialist cause, there are 
many in our ranks who would deprive the 

[147] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

Socialist cause of this service. They would 
keep out every man or woman who ventures 
to place superior education and mental train- 
ing at the disposal of the party. Has a 
comrade written a book which has pene- 
trated beyond the circumference of the 
Socialist circle, or does he or she occupy a 
position in professional life which compels 
attention from the press and the public, 
and makes it impossible for these to remain 
indifferent, then, instead of rejoicing at the 
fact, these narrow schismatics and sec- 
taries cry out in protest. Fearful lest they 
be overshadowed and no longer acknowl- 
edged as leaders, they resort to all the arts 
of knavery and demagoguery to destroy 
those whom they regard as rivals. That 
they rob the movement of great and vitally 
necessary services is to them nothings — they 
place their petty ambitions above the interests 
of the 



cause: 



* 



You cannot deny that the blessedness 
of ignorance, the contempt of knowledge, 
has been elevated into a doctrine in the 
Socialist movement in America. It is not 
always ingenuously put forth. Most often 

* Italics mine. — W. J. G. 
[148] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

it is ingeniously disguised. But it is held, 
and somewhat widely held, and its manifes- 
tations are frequent. It is a doctrine which 
at the present time probably does more harm 
to the Socialist movement than any other 
factor. It keeps from the ranks thousands 
of able men who might be of inestimable 
help. On the other hand, it is not accept- 
able to the real proletariat, and it keeps them 
also from the ranks. To them it is a fan- 
tastic aberration. Furthermore, it tends to 
give common-sense men of whatever class 
who might be sympathetic toward the 
cause a totally false impression of the 
Socialist state and of Socialist civilization. 
Then, too, it cripples the movement in its 
primary work of educating the masses in 
social science; it defeats the purposes of 
the schools and study classes, and it limits 
the circulation of the press. While it does 
not altogether prevent the election of able 
men to the highest places in the gift of the 
party, it does unquestionably operate, in 
all the larger cities of the nation, to throw 
the local party machinery into the hands 

[149] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

of crafty men and to modify the tactics 
and spirit of the movement. 

The doctrine is not a doctrine of scientific 
Socialism. It is an old doctrine of the 
church, but it has been largely superseded 
even in the church. It is a curious anomaly 
to find it coming forth in the utterances of 
men who belong to the most advanced 
movement of the time — the movement of 
which Lassalle exultantly boasted that it 
was "armed with the complete culture 
of the century." Yet it is not a novel 
manifestation. It has appeared from time 
to time throughout the history of modern 
Socialism. Marx realized its danger sixty 
years ago. He had met with the same 
attitude, and he rebuked it in strong lan- 
guage. What the proletariat needed, he 
said, was to change themselves and make 
themselves worthy of power. Resigning 
from the Central Committee of the Com- 
munist Society in September, 1850, he wrote: 

"While we say to the working people: 
' You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, 
fifty years of civil wars and wars between 

[ 150 ] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

nations not only to change existing condi- 
tions but to change yourselves and make 
yourselves worthy of political power,' you, 
on the contrary, say, ' We ought to get power 
at once, or else give up the fight.' . . . Just 
as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the 
words 'the people,' so you make one of the 
word 'proletariat.' Like them you sub- 
stitute revolutionary phrases for revolu- 
tionary evolution." 

The Communists and Socialists of Europe 
learned better in time. There, in the hard 
battles of the last sixty years with the owning 
class, it was found that every mental gift 
and faculty that could possibly be drawn 
into the service of the workers was needed. 
And the result is that to-day in Europe 
intelligent and able men are at the head 
of the Socialist movement. 

It is not a proletarian doctrine. That 
is, it is not a doctrine commonly held by 
the working class of the world. Democracy 
increasingly makes provision for education; 
it increasingly gives leadership to men of 
education and ability. It could not do 
these things if hostility to education were 

[15!] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

common among the proletariat. Only in 
the Socialist party, and then, for the most 
part, only here in America, where the move- 
ment is new and crude, does this doctrine 
develop. In its latent form, it comes largely 
as a consequence of the cult of ultra-pro- 
letarianism. The notion that the manual 
working class solely by itself, is, by some 
hocus-pocus method, to overthrow and dis- 
possess the capitalist class, leads easily, 
in untrained minds, to the notion that 
education is of little value. The doctrine 
is further fostered by that unfortunate 
dualistic use of the term "working class" 
which nine out of ten Socialists habitually, 
and for the most part innocently, employ. 
When they speak of production and ex- 
change-value and ethical recompense, they 
include in the term "working class" every 
one who renders useful service to society, 
or at least every one who in any way assists 
in the production and distribution of com- 
modities; but when they talk of organiza- 
tion and education and discipline and revo- 
lution, they mean by the term only the class 

[152] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

of manual workers employed at wages. It 
is the emphasis put upon this latter meaning 
that causes so much of the difficulty. 

This latent hostility to education may be 
sub-conscious or half -conscious; but it is 
real and abiding for all that. It may lie 
dormant for a long time. But it is a feeling 
easily roused into consciousness by dema- 
gogues, and demagogues are ever ready 
for their own purposes to incite the proleta- 
riat. The demagogues are themselves usu- 
ally professional men — men of more or less 
education. Sometimes they are men who 
feel that they have not been honored as 
their transcendent merits deserve. Inev- 
itably such men fall back upon the pro- 
letariat for support. Their demagogy is 
deliberate. They seek to prove that they 
are more proletarian than the working 
class itself. To the unthinking there is 
something attractive in the false humility of 
the educated or partly educated person 
who minimizes education. To discredit 
one's own possessions tends to put one on 
a level with the non-possessing; and the 

[153] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

pride that apes humility wins an easy- 
victory. In other cases, the demagogy is 
less conscious. An educated man coming 
into a movement so avowedly proletarian 
inevitably feels himself on the defensive; 
he feels himself in the presence of a per- 
petual challenge. Almost insensibly he is 
led to take what he innocently imagines 
to be the proletarian attitude. Usually he 
knows nothing about the working class; 
he is conscious of a sense of detachment 
from his new allies; and like an alien guest 
he must flatter his host. He comes, in 
time, to speak the same language as does 
the disgruntled seeker of honors and power. 
Wherever one traces this ultra-proletarian 
view, with its sneer at education and at 
educated men, he finds its development 
not among the real proletarians, but among 
this group of "professional proletarians" 
— of men who profess to be something other 
than what they are. 

It takes strange forms at times, and utters 
itself in rich absurdities. In its blind obliv- 
iousness to the facts of life it taboos the 

[154] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

words "leader" and "leadership" in the 
Socialist movement and assumes the equal 
intellectual and moral influence of the most 
unlettered man with the most gifted. " We 
are not followers; we need no leaders," is 
the slogan one sometimes hears from men 
who never move but when led. A phrase 
binds them, and a demagogue leads them. 
Men who look life in the face are not afraid 
of the word "leader." All men who honor 
intelligence and probity are proud to call 
themselves the followers of men wiser and 
better than themselves. Look back a third 
of a century, when the scientific movement 
was a propaganda movement as the Socialist 
movement now is, and recall the illustrious 
men who were proud to call themselves the 
followers of Darwin. Think of Huxley and 
Tyndall and Frankland and Grant Allen 
and Alfred Russel Wallace, men of the first 
grade of intelligence, honor and manliness, 
and note with what pride they accepted the 
word "follower." Are you better or wiser 
than they ? And how do you accommodate 
your disavowal of leaders and your denial 

[155] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

of leadership with your professed rigid 
allegiance to Karl Marx ? 

Then, too, at times, it utters itself in con- 
fident predictions regarding the place of 
"intellectuals" in the Socialist republic. 
"Under Socialism," says one very certain 
prophet of a semi-official sort, "there will 
be no 'intellectuals' and no manual laborers. 
You [addressing an inquirer] seem to have 
forgotten the fundamental aim of Socialism, 
the abolition of classes. In a society in 
which everybody works and no one appro- 
priates the fruit of other people's labor, 
everybody is free to develop his intellectual 
powers." 

In other words, a reversion to barbarism. 
And this is a picture of the ideal Socialist 
state, "armed with the complete culture 
of the century"! The tragedy of the matter 
is, not that an occasional writer will make 
such a demagogic utterance, but that to 
numbers of men it appeals as a satisfactory 
picture of an ideal state. Socialism, it 
ought not to be forgotten, is social evolution ; 
it is not a free-hand drawing made by an 

[156] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

obliging prophet for the benefit of men an- 
gry, like Shakespeare's Jack Cade, that other 
men should be more learned than them- 
selves. As it climbs to far heights and 
attains its dominance, it discards what 
is outgrown and unfit, but it retains what 
is best — what men have sacrificed for and 
striven for through all ages. At all costs 
it will retain learning. Those students of 
Socialism who sincerely fear that the victory, 
of the proletariat will mean a return of 
the dark ages, may find some confirmation of 
their fears in such utterances. But they can 
find none in the actual tendencies of things 
— in those living tides and currents by which 
intelligent Socialists test their estimates of a 
future state. 

The statement that Socialism involves 
the abolition of classes means no more 
than that Socialism involves the abolition 
of economic classes — of divisions of men 
whose material interests are so conflicting 
that necessarily they must fight for material 
advantage. It does not mean that Social- 
ism involves the abolition of specialized 

[157] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

kinds of occupation, intellectual and manual. 
No one who bases his picture of Socialism 
on observed facts and tendencies, rather 
than on Utopian dreams, can doubt that 
Socialism will bring about a greater and 
more widely prevalent specialization of 
function than we know to-day. Socialism 
means efficiency and progress — intellectual 
and moral progress as well as progress in 
the methods of producing commodities. 
No doubt it involves a greater mobility 
of labor — a greater and more varied effi- 
ciency of manual and even directive labor, 
so as to provide for readier transition from 
one occupation to another. But there are 
thousands of occupations useful to social 
life for efficiency in which even a lifetime 
of training is hardly sufficient; there are 
occupations the practice of which requires 
the uninterrupted time of individuals, and 
there are innate differences in men which 
fit some for one occupation and some for 
another. 

The naive notion of a society in which 
a Darwin would be compelled to manipulate 

[158] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

a linotype machine for five hours a day; 
or a Marx to handle a street-sweeper's 
broom for, say, four hours a day; or a 
Burbank, or a Pasteur, or a Metchnikoff, 
or a Huxley, or any one of tens of thousands 
of lesser scientific men to sell goods in a 
state or municipal department store, is a 
notion which excites among normal men 
either derision or disgust. "A man of 
science," says John Fiske, "should never 
be called upon to earn a living, for that 
is a wretched waste of energy in which the 
highest intellectual power is sure to suffer 
serious detriment and runs a risk of being 
frittered away into hopeless ruin." A so- 
ciety that should harness its men of genius 
to the treadmill of routine labor would 
bring about the immediate decay of scientific 
research and investigation, the dismantling 
of our laboratories and museums and 
observatories and the dumping into the 
scrap-heap of most, if not all, the triumphs 
of intellectual endeavor. 

Is it not, on the whole, likely that under 
Socialism we shall have an enormous in- 

r i59i 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

crease of social and intellectual service? 
Is it not true that most of this service can 
be rendered only by men specially set apart 
to do it ? Is it not likely that we shall have 
muscular men who can load a steamship 
or fell a tree better than they can paint 
a Sistine Madonna; skillful men who can 
run a locomotive or put together the delicate 
parts of a machine better than they can 
compose a Moonlight Sonata; deft and nim- 
ble-fingered men who can ply the productive 
arts better than they can formulate a theory 
of physical evolution or a theory of economic 
influences upon history? Will it not be 
best that they should do these things to 
the exclusion of other things, and is it not 
likely that a society based upon the foster- 
ing of the common good will so ordain? 
And will not the thousands and hundreds 
of thousands of men and women so set apart 
be " intellectuals' ' as differentiated from 
manual laborers? They will be; and no 
one doubts it in his sober moments. It 
is only when an evil purpose is to be served 
by a demagogic plea that any Socialist 

[160) 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

writer or speaker pretends to believe other- 
wise; or when roused by a fanatical spirit 
that a Socialist follower does actually believe 
it. 

It ought to be readily seen that in no 
movement is intelligence so indispensable, 
and in no movement is demagogy so harm- 
ful as in the Socialist movement. Intelli- 
gence, discipline and ability to organize — 
these, according to Karl Kautsky, in his 
Social Revolution, are "the psychological 
prerequisites for a Socialist society." He 
reiterates this over and over again. There 
can be no Socialism, there cannot even be 
a powerful Socialist movement, without 
these. "The proletariat will require," he 
says, "high intelligence, strong discipline, 
perfect organization of its great masses; 
and these must, at the same time, have 
become most indispensable in economic life 
if it is to obtain the strength sufficient to 
overcome so formidable an opponent." 

Well, has the proletariat generally this 
high intelligence ? Is not the chief Socialist 
activity — that of educating the non-Socialist 
11 [ 161 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

workers — based upon the assumption that 
the proletariat generally has not this needed 
intelligence? Do you not admit this in 
declaring that the Socialist part of the 
proletariat is the most intelligent part of 
it? Why do you tell the non-Socialist 
proletariat that what it most needs is en- 
lightenment; why do you call upon it to 
read and think, and why do you bombard 
it with books and pamphlets ? 

Because in spite of your proneness now 
and then to play the demagogue, or to 
listen to demagogues, you really value 
intelligence as the lever by which the 
proletariat is to be emancipated. And as 
you value intelligence so also do you value, 
at least in your more sober moments, the 
men who have this intelligence, and you 
advance them to the places of responsibility 
and trust in your movement. 

The Socialist movement needs not only 
a constantly increasing intelligence in the 
mass, but the exceptional intelligence of 
individual men. It does not matter whether 
this intelligence is that of individuals from 

[162] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

the proletariat's own ranks, or of individuals 
from other classes who give themselves 
to the workers' cause. Theoretically, it 
might be better that this intelligence should 
be developed within the ranks of the manual 
working class, rather than imported from 
the professional class. It would seem, in- 
deed, on first thought, that the fundamental 
tactic of the Socialist movement, that of 
uncompromising class conflict, could have 
originated only among the manual workers. 
And yet it is a fact which the whole history 
of the movement affirms, that this tactic has 
come to the movement from outside — that 
the philosophy of it and the reasons for 
it have been given by educated men. The 
very nature of the industrial worker's toil 
prompts him to seek an immediate minor 
advantage even at the expense of an ultimate 
greater advantage. Why else is it that 
in this nation there are approximately 
2,000,000 members of organized labor and 
only 53,000 members of the Socialist party ? 
You forget your own principle of the 
economic interpretation of history; you for- 

[163] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

get that the manual worker is, by the nature 
of his environment and occupation, an 
opportunist. You forget also that it is 
the prime distinction of the so-called "intel- 
lectuals" who have come into the move- 
ment that they have given the workers such 
concepts as those of class consciousness, of 
the class struggle and of uncompromising 
tactics. 

Between these men and the uninstructed 
proletariat there is naturally little antagon- 
ism. In general, whatever suspicion has 
been created, whatever antagonism has 
been awakened, has been accomplished 
through demagogy working for evil ends. 
It needs to be said plainly that there is no 
more shameless misleader of the Socialist 
proletariat than the demagogue who tries 
to create antagonism against the educated 
men in the movement. In the bourgeois 
world, the man of high intellectual gifts 
is too frequently a retainer of the capitalist 
class, and is thus an agent employed against 
the workman. But in the Socialist move- 
ment he plays no such part. He is simply 

[164] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

a soldier in the Socialist army, who happens 
to be furnished with better weapons for 
use against the common foe. The very 
use of the term "intellectual" as a name 
here in America is ignorant and absurd. 
In France, where numbers of educated 
men have come into the movement for the 
sake of personal advancement, there is 
some justification for using the term in 
a depreciatory sense. It was there that 
the term was first so employed, and it is 
the meaning given there that the demagogue 
has vaguely in mind when he uses it here. 
But there is no justification for its use in 
that sense in America. The movement 
here is as yet too small to draw men with 
that motive. Nor would the name ever 
have been so used here but for the presence 
in the movement of numbers of crafty men, 
who have made it a means of awakening 
prejudice against others more useful than 
themselves. 

Can you imagine what the Socialist 
movement would be without its educated 
men? Can you imagine where it would 

[165] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

be to-day without its Marx, its Engels, its 
Lassalle, its Liebknecht, its Kautsky, its 
Adler and Labriola and a hundred others 
who could be named? What would the 
movement in Russia be without its " in- 
tellectuals " ? Where would the demagogues 
themselves have got the few ideas and 
the few phrases which constitute their 
mental and vocal machinery? Could any 
man working at the forge or bench have 
written Das Kapital ? Who are they who 
formulate the inarticulate instincts of the 
working class, who carry its cause into the 
public arenas, who define its mission, who 
point out its goal, who warn it what gifts 
and lures to reject and what demands to 
insist upon, who tell it that its salvation is 
to come only by carrying on its combat 
without compromise ? Are they the workers 
themselves ? Rarely. The men who do 
these things are the "intellectuals" — the 
men of intelligence and ability who come 
into the movement from other classes. The 
proletariat is for the most part unin- 
structed; and just to the extent that it is 

[166] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

uninstructed it is the sport and plaything 
of its political and economic masters. It 
fights their battles, it permits itself to be 
robbed and starved and beaten, it throws 
itself to the support of adventurers and dem- 
agogues. Only as it is instructed by 
trained intelligence does it learn how to 
protect itself, or advance toward its eman- 
cipation. 

The Socialist movement is of necessity 
a working-class movement. It will remain 
that, no matter what any one wishes or 
fears. But the working class is something 
greater and broader than the aggregate of 
persons who do manual labor. And the 
Socialist movement is even greater and 
broader than the working class. There is 
no more place for class distinctions in that 
movement than there will be in the Socialist 
republic. There is no room in that move- 
ment for the demagogue. There is no 
room for the plea that ignorance is better 
than intelligence, that incompetency is better 
than efficiency, that the man who works 
with his hands is by reason of the nature 

[167] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

of his employment better than the man who 
writes or teaches or organizes or plans, 
or who does any other useful service to 
society. To a real Socialist, it is a humilia- 
tion to feel the necessity of uttering these 
words. But until you learn them, until 
you also learn to put down with contempt 
every manifestation of the fetish-worship 
of ignorance, you are waging a futile struggle 
in the dark. You are battling, not against 
Capitalism, but against Socialism. 

So much for the matter of proletarian 
vs. "intellectual." If I have dwelt overlong 
upon it, I have done so because it seems 
to me the most serious subject of present 
concern to the movement. But the other 
matters I have mentioned need also your 
conscientious thought. What profits it that 
you learn to deride the jingoism of a nation, 
if you exalt the jingoism of a party and a 
class ? Is it well to forswear your individual 
judgment of right and wrong and servilely 
to bind yourselves to accept as right the 
momentary caprice and mis judgment of 
numbers ? Is it not a better proof of loyalty 

[168] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

to your cause to reject the conventional 
jingo phrase, and to say, with Carl Schurz, 
"My nation [or party or class], when right, 
to be kept right; when wrong to be set 
right"? And is it well or wise, for a 
trumpery appearance of momentary gain, 
with all its evil consequences in the future, 
to make yourselves parties to the wrongful 
acts of your fellows ? In accepting as a 
sacred principle the sentiment of undeviat- 
ing party regularity, you are called upon 
to do just that thing. 

Is it well, either, to accept the too com- 
mon conviction in the Socialist movement 
that all needful truth has been discovered, 
and that most of it is to be found within the 
pages of Karl Marx ? With what face can 
you laugh at religious zealots when they 
appeal to their holy books? In Marx you 
find what you find in the Christian apostles : 
though at times he deprecates undue faith 
in the immediacy of great changes, yet the 
refrain, "The time is at hand!" is reiterated 
throughout his work. He failed in some 
of his prophecies; he wrote in a formative 

[169] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

time when no man could possibly measure 
all the current tendencies; there is much 
in his pages which, if not absolutely con- 
tradictory, at least furnishes the material 
for contradictory schools of Marxists. Yet 
the orthodox are asked to accept his literal 
words as the alpha and omega, the beginning 
and the end. No more Socialist books 
should be written, say some ; what is needed 
is the learning of Marx by rote. To every 
voicing of inquiry or doubt comes the 
Mohammedan response, "It is written," 
or "There is no god but the Allah of Eco- 
nomic Force, and Karl Marx is his prophet." 
If the substance is in the Koran, what is 
newly written is unnecessary; if not there, 
it is false, and in neither case is it to 
be tolerated. Do history and science make 
possible the sustaining of any such assump- 
tion of infallibility? And yet belief in 
that infallibility you seek to make a Socialist 
article of creed. 

What profits it, too, that you are taught 
to look with tolerant scorn upon Owen and 
Fourier and Saint-Simon as " Utopians," 

[170] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

if in your imagination of the Socialist state 
you endow it with conditions of bliss which 
even a Mohammedan dervish or a Christian 
hermit hesitates to picture in his imagined 
heaven? To hear your rhapsodies, one 
might think that under Socialism pain would 
be eliminated, that strife would cease, and 
that pride and anger and self-seeking and 
jealousy and hate and treachery would no 
more be known, and that every one would 
be learned and kind and just. One sort of 
utopianism you may have outgrown; but 
in its place you have developed one that is 
more at variance with the facts of life than 
was that of the early Socialists. We may 
rightly expect that under Socialism vast 
changes in human conditions will take 
place. We may rightly expect the elimina- 
tion of poverty, the widening of opportu- 
nities for self-development, the realization 
of greater freedom. And for these expecta- 
tions and ideals men nobly give themselves 
to the cause, to live for it and to die for it. 
But men are still men, under whatever 
economic system they live. The fratricidal 
[171] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

struggle for the means of life may be termi- 
nated, and men may still reveal the ape and 
the tiger. In the Socialist movement the 
economic motive for internal strife is but 
rarely, if ever, present. And yet who will care 
to say that strife has therein been eliminated, 
or that the conduct of Socialists toward one 
another differs in any material degree from 
that of the members of other parties ? You 
will do well to confine your dreams within 
scientific bounds. 

Fanaticism has always been a curse to 
the race, and the employment of ill means 
for supposedly good ends a greater one. 
Yet how often you sanction the one and 
condone the other. That in a movement 
professing to be scientific there should be 
the slightest tolerance for that mad violence 
of the emotions, that dethronement of 
reason, which we know as fanaticism, is an 
anomaly. Yet perhaps everywhere, outside 
Milwaukee, in the Socialist party of America 
there is always that degree of latent 
fanaticism which makes it possible at ^any 
moment, by the raising of a false issue or 

[172] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

the making of a false charge, to foment 
a bitter and prolonged strife. How many 
utterly needless controversies have been 
waged these last ten years ! Though some 
of them arose spontaneously, many were 
deliberately planned for evil ends. And 
yet few of them could have arisen, or could 
have been fought with such flaming anger, 
but for the latent fanaticism in the ranks. 
But fanaticism, evil as it is, is less of a 
violation of a scientific creed than is Jesuitry. 
After all, we cannot be sure about our 
goals — about the ends for which we strive. 
Every end for which man has striven has 
been found, when achieved, or partly 
achieved, a disappointment. Every politi- 
cal or social or religious cause, from the 
triumph of which men have expected so 
much, has been found in victory to be less 
than the thing imagined. Often it has been 
found to be the opposite of what men desired. 
Socialism itself will prove a disappointment 
to its devotees. But every advancement 
of ethical standards has been a permanent 
gain. Every moralization of the means 

[173] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

which men employ in their contests — - 
whether in war, or politics or religion — 
has lifted up the race. Shall we not say 
then, with Prof. Felix Adler, that means 
are the important thing and that ends are 
the less important thing? Let us with 
might and main strive for the ideal which 
possesses us; but let us do it with a willing- 
ness to suffer an endless chain of defeats 
rather than compromise the means which 
we employ — knowing that the sanctioning 
of fanaticism or the condonation of Jesuitry 
invariably reacts upon our cause. 

Let us also be tolerant in our own ranks 
of that freedom of thought and of speech 
which we so insistently claim for ourselves 
against the ruling powers. Let us further- 
more be careful about ascribing to capital- 
ism such prevailing ethical standards as 
happen not to please us — standards which 
often have a life history contemporaneous 
with civilized man. Let us be equally 
careful not to ascribe to capitalism vices 
innate in human nature and from which 
mankind has never been free. An indict- 

[174] 



TO SOME SOCIALISTS 

ment is best drawn when most exact; 
and the capitalist system, with its record 
of blood and oppression, has enough in its 
history to warrant conviction and the death 
sentence without swelling the indictment 
with unprovable charges. Let us further- 
more remember always that the appeal to 
the working class to awaken to a conscious- 
ness of its numbers and power — to a sense 
of its brute strength — is a futile appeal, 
at once barbarous and ineffective; that it 
is only by an appeal to its sense of justice 
that an effective response is gained; and 
that even if the fact were otherwise the result 
would be fatal to the Socialist ideal. And 
lastly, let us remember that the enlightened 
class struggle of to-day is not a medieval 
peasants' revolt, but the struggle of a class 
which in the main identifies its interests 
with the ultimate interests of all men; and 
that in so far as it does this it makes for the 
Socialist republic, and in so far as it fails 
to do this it makes for reaction and chaos. 
This Socialist movement is slowly, almost 
imperceptibly, but surely day by day, 

[175] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

molding and making " a noble and puissant 
nation " — a nation that develops internation- 
ally within and despite the many political 
states that now separate men from their 
fellows; a nation that welds the conflicting 
wills and prejudices of men into a common 
spirit and that presages a commonwealth 
which shall know not race nor class nor 
frontier or boundary. In the "mighty 
youth" of this nation there must inevitably 
arise many evils and confusions — strivings 
at cross purposes, a babel of voices about 
the work in hand ; in the minds of the build- 
ers wild illusions and false estimates, and 
in their hearts fierce prejudices and bitter 
hates. We may conveniently blind our- 
selves to these evils; we may nurture a 
false pride which forbids their recognition, 
or their mention when recognized. But we 
do so to the loss of the movement and of the 
nascent nation of which the movement is the 
directing force. For the flaws and faults 
built into the foundation weaken the super- 
structure for all time. Be it our mission so 
to build that the structure shall endure. 

[176] 



CHAPTER V 

TO MR. JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

They tell me, Mr. Smith, that you are 
not a Socialist. Why aren't you? Is it 
because your preacher, or your local poli- 
tician, has told you that Socialism isn't 
at all "the right thing"? Or have you 
read somewhere the statement of some 
college head that Socialism won't do? 
Or has the great Theodore himself in- 
fluenced you by means of one of his pro- 
nouncements regarding undesirable citizens 
and undesirable social systems? Or are 
you merely indifferent to other than your 
immediate concerns ? 

They tell me, also, that you are a member 
of the union in your trade. So far, so good. 
You recognize at least a part of your 
interests as against those of your employers. 
As a member of your union you are engaged 

12 [ 177 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

in a struggle for better conditions, shorter 
hours and higher wages. Or if it happens 
that the conditions, hours and wages in your 
trade are about as favorable as you can for 
the time expect, you are at least engaged 
in a contest to maintain them at their present 
level. You recognize a common interest 
with your fellows in your own trade. Isn't 
it about time now to consider a wider and 
fuller community of interest — a oneness of 
interest with all men who work for wages ? 
Trade-unionism is the first manifestation 
of this sense of oneness of interest among 
the workers. Long before the workmen 
have reached a sense of the need of a reor- 
ganized social system, their immediate needs 
in the matter of wages, hours and conditions 
prompt them to associate for offense and 
defense against their employers. Have you 
any employer in your union? Certainly 
not — not even the best of the "good" 
employers. Common sense tells you that 
the employer has one set of interests, while 
you have a different set of interests. Con- 
sequently you do not think it best for the 

[178] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

welfare of your union to include employers 
in its membership. 

That difference of interest, John, is one 
that runs throughout all the processes of 
modern society. You will realize the fact 
when you stop to think about it. The 
trouble is, you haven't thought much about 
it. You go along from day to day, looking 
up for counsel and wisdom to this or that 
statesman or preacher or editor or college 
dignitary. These are all very profound 
men, no doubt, but the trouble for you is 
that they all live in a different world from 
yours; they do not do the kind of work 
you do or get the kind of pay you do; they 
do not see life from your standpoint; and 
consequently the things they tell you to 
believe and to do are pretty apt to be bad 
for you. You know, for instance, without 
any one telling you, that your employer's 
interests in the matter of hours, wages and 
conditions in your particular trade are 
antagonistic to your own interests. Yet 
you permit yourself to be persuaded by 
plausible advisers from your employer's 

[179] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

class that in a thousand other matters you 
have identical interests with your employer; 
that you may, without loss, vote for his 
candidates for the legislature, Congress 
and the Presidency. 

That word "class" may trouble you 
somewhat. For perhaps you have heard 
that it is a wicked and seditious word, used 
only by disturbers of the peace and fomenters 
of hatred. But it ought not to trouble 
you, no matter what warnings you have 
heard. For it expresses a very manifest 
and concrete thing in this life of ours. 
A class — that is, an economic class — is an 
aggregate of persons whose specific eco- 
nomic functions and interests are similar. 
We may all have similar general interests; 
we may all desire peace, health and plenty; 
but our specific interests vary and conflict 
in accord with the different methods by 
which we make a living. We call those 
aggregates of persons whose functions and 
interests differ but in degree, and not in 
kind, economic groups or sections; but 
those larger divisions, founded upon funda- 

[180] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

mental differences in modes of getting a 
living, we call economic classes. 

Your employer, for instance, whose inter- 
ests you recognize as different from your 
own, is an owner of machinery and tools, up- 
on which you work for a wage. You make 
goods for him, which he sells in the market, 
paying you a part of their value and keeping 
a part for himself. Or he may be the owner 
of a store or a transportation system or 
a help-employing farm. We call this man 
a member of the owning or the capitalist 
class. He may be a small employer — that is, 
he may be a comparatively poor man and 
own very little machinery or a very small 
store; we should then call him a middle- 
class man, or a petty manufacturer or petty 
dealer. Or he may be a great employer — an 
owner of very much machinery, or a very large 
store, and we should then call him a magnate. 
But middle class and magnate class are after 
all only two groups of the great owning class, 
or capitalist class, and their fundamental in- 
terests are the same. You, on the other hand, 
who have no machinery or no business plant, 

[181] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

and must therefore, in order to live, work 
for the capitalist, we call a working-class 
man, or a wage-earning producer, or a 
proletarian. No matter what the Eminent 
Persons tell you, the fact of economic 
classes is something you cannot afford to 
lose sight of for a single moment. 

I said that you allow yourself to be per- 
suaded that in a thousand matters outside 
your immediate trade you have interests iden- 
tical with those of your employer. Let us see 
if you have such identical interests. To look 
into the matter we shall have to take some 
account of this organization of things we call 
society, and particularly of that division of 
it known as the working class. 

Every social state, any time and any- 
where, is based upon certain arrangements 
for producing and distributing goods. The 
sum of these arrangements in any particular 
time is known as an economic system. 
Every economic system builds up a super- 
structure of law, custom and administra- 
tion. In other words, any particular social 
system, including the general form of govern- 

[182] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

ment, will be found to be a reflex of the 
economic system that underlies it. A slave 
system produces one sort of society and 
government, a serf system another, and a 
wage system another yet. Sometimes, as 
in the United States previous to the Civil 
War, the anomaly is shown of two widely 
different societies, founded upon radically 
different economic systems, existing side 
by side under one general government. 
The anomaly was rendered possible only by 
State autonomy, which permitted political 
forms and institutions in the Southern 
States to accord with the slave system and 
political forms and institutions in the North- 
ern States to accord with the wage system. 
No wonder that Abraham Lincoln spoke 
of the nation as a house divided against 
itself and declared that it could not stand. 
On the other hand, political forms may 
for a time differ somewhat in two countries 
or among two peoples with like economic 
systems. But in the main, even though one 
nation may be headed by a powerless king 
and the other by a powerful president, the 

[183] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

general social structure, the code of laws, the 
mode of administration, the standards of 
right and wrong, in the one nation will re- 
semble those of the other nation just about in 
proportion as the underlying economic sys- 
tems of the two nations resemble each other. 
The economic system under which we 
live, as you are aware, John, is known as 
the capitalist system. It is not an old 
system, as systems go, dating back only 
about 150 years. That is, its infancy began 
about that long ago. But it was a good 
while in its infancy; and the time is short, 
say a few decades, since it reached any- 
thing like its present power. No one is 
criminally responsible for it. Like Topsy, 
it just grew, for it couldn't help growing. 
It got its start when the first great inventions 
were made and when steam was applied 
to factory work. The result of these 
changes was to take the workman away 
from his tools and to lodge him in a factory 
or machine shop, where he had to work 
upon machines owned by other men. He 
had to do this or starve. He had to give 

[184] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

over the home work which before he had 
done with his own tools, and take the wages 
offered him by the owner of the machines. 

The advantage of this mode of producing 
goods was very soon apparent. That is, the 
advantage to the owner. The advantage to 
the worker was not so marked. But facto- 
ries increased in number, capital gradually 
became concentrated, and there was soon 
created a large class of workers owning little 
or nothing and having no means of making 
a living except by working for others. 

This class has persisted to the present 
time, constantly increasing its numbers 
relative to the whole population. It 
now numbers, in the United States, some 
20,234,000 persons out of some 29,073,000 
persons engaged in gainful occupations. It 
is the class to which you belong, John, even 
though you are not wholly aware of the fact 
— even though you are inclined to take the 
words of a Strenuous and Distinguished 
Person that you are just as good as anyone 
else, and that nothing else than the Square 
Deal is ever dealt out to you. 

[185] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

Let us now consider somewhat the situa- 
tion and composition of this class. First, 
we want a definition, and that is a hard 
thing to frame, because different persons 
mean very different things when they speak 
of the working class. Roughly, the term 
may be said to mean the aggregate of 
persons employed for wages at more or less 
common tasks. Uncommon tasks, requir- 
ing exceptional training, or education, or 
ability to manage men or affairs, are of 
course outside the working-class province. 
Perhaps we may better say that the term 
means the aggregate of persons who have 
nothing to barter for a livelihood but their 
muscle power and manual skill, and who 
are employed for wages at common tasks 
set by other men. This class thus com- 
prises the toilers in the more common cleri- 
cal and distributive tasks in trade and 
transportation, the manual toilers in the 
manufacturing, mechanical and mining in- 
dustries, in personal and domestic service 
and miscellaneous day labor, and hired 
persons in agriculture and the other rural 

[186] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

industries. Mr. Lucien Sanial, the well- 
known statistician, makes their number in 
1900, 20,393,137. My own figures are 
almost identical. Rearranging the census 
groups in order to separate, in so far as 
may be done, employer from employed, the 
numbers of the groups in this class and 
their rate of increase from 1890 to 1900 
appear as follows: 

THE WORKING CLASS. 





Per cent, 
of increase 


No. 




1900 


1800 


Clerical and distributive 
workers 


48.4 

23.8 

26.3 
44.7 
37.4 


3,825,375 

6,538,147 

2,618,910 
4,623,157 
2,629,262 


2,578,087 


Mechanical, mfg. and 
mining workers 

Personal and domestic 
workers 


5,279,586 
2,072,540 


Farm and rural workers . 
General workers 


*3,194,073 
1,913,373 


Total 


34.4 


20,234,851 


15,037,659 



* The officials of the census of 1900 believe that approx- 
imately 582,522 children engaged in farm labor were 
omitted from enumeration in 1890. 

[187] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

You will notice that the clerical and 
distributive workers show the greatest per- 
centage of increase. The fact is a striking 
illustration of the increasing importance 
of trade and transportation as compared 
with mere production. Fewer men are 
needed in making things, and more men are 
needed in selling and advertising and deliv- 
ering things. The productive workers in 
shop and factory not only show the lowest 
rate of increase among the workers, but 
among the total of gainfully occupied per- 
sons their proportion has actually fallen 
off. They formed 23.2 per cent, of this 
total in 1890, but in 1900 they formed but 
22.5 per cent. Production has enormously 
increased, but the number of producers 
advances by a rate only slightly greater 
than that of the population. Consolidation 
of industries and the perfecting of machinery 
and of trade processes have worked their 
way with a savage relentlessness, displacing 
many men. The extent of this displace- 
ment is in many industries enormous. In 
flouring and grist mills and in the manu- 

[188] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

facture of dye-stuffs and extracts it is 22 
per cent.; in canning and preserving fruits 
and vegetables, 27 per cent. ; in brick- and 
tile-making and in the manufacture of 
wool hats, 40 per cent. ; in the manufacture 
of wrought pipe, 52 per cent.; of billiard 
tables and materials, 55 per cent.; of cut 
and wrought nails, 73 per cent., and of 
wire, 80 per cent. In 22 of the specific 
census groups of manufacturing, mechan- 
ical and mining workers, employing 
1,658,526 workers in 1890, there was a 
decrease of 100,000 by 1900. 

Other branches of production partly com- 
pensate for this loss. But these gains have 
been mostly among the new and developing 
industries. The older and more stable 
industries generally reveal but slight, if 
any, increases. This tendency toward dis- 
placement, moreover, does not promise 
to lessen. Consolidation is as yet but in its 
dawn, and the possibilities of the machine 
would seem to be almost infinite. Every 
day sees some improvement in mechanism, 
and were it not for the thousands of inven- 

[189] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

tions securely locked up for fear that they 
will make useless some of the machinery 
now in use, the rate of improvement would 
be much greater. 

The growth in the number of personal 
and domestic workers is also but slight. 
Yet the increase of luxury is notorious. 
Perhaps never since the days of the Caesars 
has there been such wasteful expenditure as 
now. One would expect to find a tremen- 
dous growth of personal service, yet the total 
number of domestic and personal workers 
has failed to hold its own relative to the 
other groups. It has gained 26.3 per cent, 
in actual numbers, but its proportion of the 
whole body of occupied persons has fallen 
slightly, being but 9.01 per cent., as against 
9.12 per cent, in 1890. Here again, though 
to a slighter extent, is concentration at 
work. There is a growth of collective 
personal service instead of individual per- 
sonal service. The modern rush from 
individual homes to hotels and apartment 
houses results in applying the services of 
a few servants to many families. One 

[190] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

servant does service for many masters, and 
twenty servants in a modern hotel probably 
do the work which would employ one hun- 
dred in a society living in individual homes. 

The farm and rural workers numbered 
one-fifth of the total, and apparently they in- 
creased in numbers by 44.7 per cent. But if 
the surmise of the census officials is correct, 
and it probably is, that nearly 600,000 
workers were omitted in the preceding 
census — the increase would be less than 23 
per cent. Last come the general laborers, 
with an increase of 37.4 per cent. From 
numbering 8.41 per cent, of all occupied 
persons in 1890, they now number 9.04 per 
cent. The burden and hardship of the pres- 
ent order rests most heavily upon these 
workers. Toolless, unskilled, unorganized, 
overworked and underpaid, the first sufferers 
from a depression in business and the last 
to benefit by better times, they are pecul- 
iarly the victims of the capitalist system. 

This working class numbers nearly 70 
per cent, of the total of gainfully occupied 
persons. While two of its larger groups — 

[191] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

those of the factory and shop workers and 
of personal and domestic workers — increase 
but slowly, actually declining proportion- 
ately, the class as a whole increases steadily 
at the expense of every other class. Though 
it is commonly called the "working class," 
a more scientific designation would be the 
"workable" class. For its units, no matter 
how eager they may be for employment, 
are worked only when capital so determines, 
and capital so determines only when it 
sees a probable profit ahead. The workers 
have no means of creating or controlling 
opportunities for employment; they must 
depend entirely upon capital, which owns 
the tools and other means of production; 
and they must therefore suffer long periods 
of enforced idleness, with the inevitable 
consequence of privation and suffering. 
The statistics of unemployment grow more 
ghastly. For the census year 1900 no less 
than 6,468,964 persons were idle for periods 
of from one to 12 months. This number 
is nearly one-fourth of the total of occupied 
persons in the nation. Here are the figures : 

[192] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

UNEMPLOYMENT— 1900. 





1 to 3 mos. 


4 to 6 mos. 


7 to 12 mos. 


Total. 


Males 


2,593,136 
584,617 


2,069,546 
485,379 


564,790 
171,496 


5,227,472 


Females 


1,241,492 


Total 


3,177,753 


2,554,925 


736,286 


6,468,964 





The rate of unemployment, moreover, 
increased greatly from 1890 to 1900. Out 
of 140 occupation groups specified for males, 
125 show decreased percentages of employ- 
ment since 1890, while out of 63 groups 
specified for females, 56 show decreased per- 
centages. Even among the 22 exceptions, 
eight groups show virtually no increase. 
There are thus, out of 203 occupation 
groups, only 14 that show a sensibly in- 
creased rate of employment when compared 
with 1890. 

They tell you sometimes — the Eminent 
Persons whose trade it is to defend and 
excuse the present system — that much of 
this unemployment is voluntary; that it is 
caused by the action of the workers them- 

13 [ 193 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

selves in leaving their jobs. These retainers 
could not make this statement with sincerity 
if they studied the figures; but, then, of 
course, it is not their business to study the 
figures. As a matter of record, strikes 
have hardly an appreciable effect upon the 
general tables of unemployment. Let us 
take an extreme case — the great building 
trades strike of six years ago in New York 
City. This strike, according to the State 
Labor Commissioner, was responsible for 
10,593 workers being idle at the end of 
September, 1904. But, according to the 
census, there were, in 1900, with no general 
strike to swell the record, 257,012 persons 
in New York City idle for more than one 
month, 26,021 of whom were idle for more 
than seven months. Unusually great as 
was this number of voluntary idlers from 
the building trades in 1904, it represented 
but 4 per cent, of the number unemployed 
during the normal year of 1900. For the 
State of New York it represented but one 
per cent., and for the nation only an infini- 
tesimal fraction of one per cent. 

[194] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

This, then, is that working class to which 
you belong, with something of its composi- 
tion, of its relation to the prevailing system, 
and of the tendencies that govern it. It 
grows in numbers, both absolutely and 
relatively, but the demand for its service 
fails to increase sufficiently to keep the toilers 
at work. The cheaper production that 
comes from consolidation and improved 
machinery does not provide the displaced 
workers with other jobs. Recurring periods 
of stoppages of work are an inevitable part 
of the capitalist system; and as that system 
develops, with increasing numbers seeking 
the labor that a lessening number can per- 
form, the volume of unemployment must 
necessarily grow. This working class has, 
in the main, no productive property of its 
own. Some of its members have deposits 
in savings banks, and these deposits are 
loaned to owners of businesses; but this 
remote and indirect mode of ownership 
does not give the workers any share in 
the control of these properties. Having 
no ownership, they must work upon the 

[195] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

terms dictated by the owners. They must, 
in the main, work for low wages, for long 
hours, under hard conditions. They must 
brave danger, they must suffer hurt, they 
must endure unhealthful surroundings, they 
must undergo long periods of impoverish- 
ment due to shut-downs which they cannot 
prevent. It would seem — would it not? — 
that something ought to be done about it 
all; and that society, in its organized form, 
the state, which professes to be the guardian 
of every man's welfare, should ordain a 
fairer order. 

But social and governmental systems, 
John, are not run for the benefit of the 
working class. It does not make any differ- 
ence (except in degree) whether this working 
class is a slave class, a serf class or a wage- 
earning class. The social structure that 
arises upon the foundations of an economic 
system is always one that accords as fully as 
possible with the interests of the owning class. 
Of course the owning class cannot have 
everything, particularly in a society wherein 
the workers have the ballot. But it takes 

[196] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

everything it can get and safely hold. Some- 
times, in its fatuous will to seize more than 
it can safely hold, it will even jeopard 
all its possessions and its very existence. 

It matters little to you if there should be 
temporary fights between factions of the 
owning class. Just now you may observe, 
John, a very spirited conflict, though fre- 
quently degenerating into sham battle and 
farce, between the middle class and the 
magnate class. Both of them call to you 
for help. The middle class warns you 
against the enormous acquisitions of wealth 
and power by the magnate class, and the 
magnate class in turn warns you against 
any disturbance of the sacred relations of 
business. One tells you that the other, 
if allowed to go on, will soon own every- 
thing while you own nothing, and the other 
tells you that unless you allow it to go on 
and acquire everything it wants, you will 
have no work and wages. But both of 
them really want the same system of things. 
That is, they both want rent, interest and 
profit to continue; they want the perpetua- 

[197] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

tion of the wage system and of competition 
in the means of life. But the middle class 
wants some restraint put upon the magnate 
class. It likes the game, but it wants the 
rules changed so that the best players can- 
not make all the winnings. It is all one 
to you, John. Whichever wins, your share 
will be about the same. Both are but fac- 
tions of the great owning class ; they are con- 
cerned with their own interests, and they are 
not concerned with yours. When you take 
sides with either against the other you only 
sacrifice your own interests. 

It is this great owning class which in the 
main determines what laws shall be passed, 
what judges, governors, legislators, Con- 
gressmen and Presidents shall be elected, 
and what persons shall go to jail. Of 
course the two factions do not always agree 
about the laws and the governors and 
judges. Indeed, they sometimes differ very 
widely. But they take pains that the en- 
acted law and the elected person shall be 
"safe" from the standpoint of capitalism. 
Very rarely do they so far forget themselves, 

[198] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

in their mutual rivalries, as to let a radical 
working-class law get on the statute books 
or a radical working-class man get into office. 
You may have noted also that this owning 
class, for all its powers, does not poll all 
the votes. It polls, in fact, very few of 
them. Neither does it fight the battles in 
times of war. It doesn't have to. It has 
something better. It calls upon your class 
to vote its ballots and to fight its battles — 
and you cheerfully and often enthusiastically 
comply. You wouldn't if you knew better. 
But there's the rub — you don't know any 
better. Just as far as the economic con- 
flict is perceived by you — that is, to just 
the extent that the wages, hours and con- 
ditions in your workshop may be influenced 
by united action against your employer 
— you are awake. But though this phase 
of the economic conflict is the most per- 
ceptible one— the one easiest for a near- 
sighted man to see — it is not the most 
important phase. 

Beyond a certain point, John, even as 
you are beginning to see, your union cannot 

[199] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

better your hours, wages or conditions. 
It cannot in any case save you from panics 
and unemployment. The other men have 
the machinery, the railroads, the steam- 
boats, the coal-lands and about everything 
else worth while. They are able to defeat 
you and your comrades in the majority 
of your strikes. From the army of out- 
of-works, even in these most "prosperous" 
times, they can readily fill every place 
vacated by you. What matters it if you 
need food, clothing and a thousand com- 
forts for yourselves, your wives and your 
children? They also need things — silks, 
wines, automobiles, country estates, city 
palaces. They need other things — legisla- 
tors, Congressmen, judges, editors and the 
like, and some of these things are expensive. 
And their needs come first. If they gave up 
to your needs, there wouldn't be so much 
left for themselves. Their first duty is to 
themselves, as they see it, and besides they 
have the power — which you haven't — of 
saying who shall be served first. 

They own and you work. They deter- 
[200] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

mine the rules of the game. You obey, or 
you don't play. Their will is dominant 
throughout all the processes of law and 
administration. It will be so as long as 
they own the machinery of production. 
A like dominance will prevail as long as 
any one part of the community owns this 
machinery. It ^ would not matter if to- 
morrow every present member of the own- 
ing class were dislodged from ownership, 
so long as a new set of owners were put in 
their places. Only by society as a whole 
assuming the ownership of the means of 
production and distribution will it be pos- 
sible for you to get your rightful share of 
the product of your toil. Only so will it 
be possible for you even to be sure of the 
opportunity of toil when you want it. 

But you cannot bring about any such 
result so long as you may be persuaded that 
under the private ownership of the social 
means of production your own and your 
employers' interests are identical. In a 
collectivist society your interests would 
indeed be the same as those of other men; 

[201] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

and it is this ideal of an ultimate identity 
of all men's interests that impels your 
clearer-sighted brothers to wage warfare 
against a class. The Union men in the 
Civil War waged such a conflict: they were 
inspired by the ideal of a stronger and 
fairer union in the future, but they knew 
such a union was impossible until the 
powers of a sectional class were subdued. 
The crying of "Peace!" when there was 
no peace they held to be copperheadism ; 
they knew that acquiescence in peace with- 
out victory for the Union side meant the 
continuance of intolerable evils; they recog- 
nized a present duty of warfare to insure 
an ultimate unity. 

Their memorable struggle was a political 
warfare; this is an economic and a social 
warfare. So long as you can be affected 
by the cry of "Peace!" the contest proceeds 
haltingly and confusedly; just so long your 
employer and his fellow-employers will 
arrange among themselves, directly or in- 
directly, the conditions under which you 
work and live. They do not, as you know, 

[202] 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

want the same things that you do. They 
want to pay low wages, and you want to 
receive high wages. They want you to 
work long hours, and you want to work 
short hours. The time you want to your- 
selves for leisure or amusement or culture 
they want you to spend in producing more 
goods for them. They want you to com- 
pete against one another for jobs, and you 
want to agree among yourselves about jobs 
and wages and to bargain collectively. They 
want a large share of what you produce, 
and you want the full value of your product. 
You realize all this as between yourself and 
your immediate employer, but you do not 
realize it as between all employers and all 
workmen. You do not realize that if you 
and your fellow-workers were so minded, 
you might vastly better your lot. You are 
numerous enough. But you lack that sense 
of oneness of interest with all workers as 
against all employers which would impel 
you to unite with your fellows to bring about 
a social change. 

Yet that social change is coming, and 

[203] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

coming through you and your fellows. 
You cannot forever hesitate and hold back. 
You cannot forever accept the plausible 
arguments of those who would keep you 
divided. Nor can you, as your conscious- 
ness awakens to a sense of what might be 
on this planet, remain satisfied with the 
mean lot and the narrow horizon of the 
average worker's life. Neither can you 
fail to see, as the contest between capital 
and labor becomes more pronounced, and 
as its issues are carried into legislatures and 
the courts, that it is capital's control of 
governmental powers which ultimately de- 
feats you. So seeing, you cannot fail to 
act; you cannot fail to strive in union with 
your fellows for the conquest of the political 
powers. You may delight in the plausible 
arguments of the retainers; you may even 
wish always to be so pleasantly deluded. 
But forces mightier than your wish make 
for your liberation. Association in toil 
at like tasks; a growing realization of the 
impossibility of "rising to another sphere"; 
a frank acceptance of a working-class 

r 204 1 



JOHN SMITH, WORKINGMAN 

career; daily training in mutual helpfulness 
and mutual sacrifice, breed in you and 
your fellows the sense of a oneness of interest 
among all workers and a collectivist ideal 
of life. Against your will you are led to 
Socialism, as millions of your fellows have 
been led. You take your place in the 
ranks and become one in the great army 
of progress. 

What matters it that in the Socialist 
movement you see grave faults ? Is your 
own union free from them? Has not each 
movement — each organization of men — 
faults peculiar to itself? If an ideal and a 
purpose too fiercely held produce suspicion 
and hatred and fanaticism — those sur- 
vivals of primitive man — does not a vague 
ideal and an indefinite aim produce sloth 
and cowardice and weakness ? But were 
the faults of the Socialist movement many 
times greater than they are, the remedy 
is yet with you. For it is your movement; 
it has no interests other than yours; it asks 
your co-operation, and you may make it 
what you will. It has, of course, its definite 

[205] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

foundation principles, and you cannot 
wrench it from these; it will not permit 
itself to be warped from its revolutionary 
purpose of transforming a fratricidal so- 
ciety of warring states and classes into an 
international fellowship. And unless you 
accept these principles and this purpose 
and until you have given over your sub- 
servience to the men who mislead you, 
you have no place within its ranks and no 
power to affect it. But within these bounds 
you can make it your medium for winning 
a world. Divided among yourselves, and 
fighting a few desultory skirmishes with 
the antiquated weapons of the strike and 
the boycott, you are defeated and pressed 
back. United, disciplined and equipped, 
and made conscious of your oneness of inter- 
est with all other workers, you may move 
forward to victory. 



[206] 



CHAPTER VI 

TO THE SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

You doubt Socialism, and you reject it. 
Though you recognize the monstrous evils 
of the present system, and though you wish 
for a fairer life than this, you do not believe 
that Socialism points the way. Sometimes 
you would like to believe so, but cannot; 
and at other times you do not even want to 
believe so. Many objections come to your 
mind. How could Socialism do this thing ? 
and, How could it prevent that thing? 
you ask. You cast up quickly, and you 
reply, It could neither do the one thing 
nor prevent the other. And so for the 
moment, until the "obstinate questionings" 
come to you again, you conclude, No, 
Socialism is impossible. 

You hear from preacher and teacher and 
editor the stock arguments; and their in- 

[207] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

fluence, consciously or unconsciously, lies 
heavily upon you. True, you are not 
greatly impressed by the stupid assertion 
that Socialism means "dividing up"; nor 
unless you are easily gullible does the 
" menace-to-the-f amily " phrase seriously 
bother you. You see, if you have good 
eyes, more menace to the family under the 
present system than you can well imagine 
under any other. The "tyrannous-bureau- 
cracy" phrase no doubt to some extent 
awakens your apprehension; but even this 
you learn to discount. For in the first 
place, you are not unacquainted with 
"tyrannous bureaucracy" under our present 
system; and in the second place both you 
and all other men except anarchists and 
magnates, if only you have some aspiration 
toward social justice, would be willing 
to risk a certain measure of bureaucratic 
tyranny if it promised an amelioration of 
want and suffering. 

But other questions recur. How against 
such stupendous forces can Socialism pos- 
sibly win? and, How, even if it could win, 

[208] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

could it possibly work? you ask. What 
incentive would men have for exertion? 
How could useful initiative be expected of 
them? What would become of liberty? 
You take up Schaeffle's Impossibility of 
Social Democracy, and you repeat after 
him still other objections. How can a 
democracy effect collective production? 
How can Socialism unite all branches of 
industry with uniform labor time? How 
can it increase the net result of production ? 
How can it apportion recompense — either, 
on the one hand, according to the exact 
value of one's product, or on the other hand, 
according to one's needs ? How can it end 
the exploitation of labor power? How can 
it abolish the wage-system and private 
service ? 

No, you say, Socialism is impossible. It 
cannot establish itself, and even if it could 
the problems which it promises so readily 
to solve are in the main unsolvable. And 
so let us eternally patch and mend the thing 
we have, confident that some improvement 
will come, rather than run the risk of some- 

14 [ 209 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

thing new and strange. No more Utopias! 
No more millennial anticipations! It is a 
poor world, and we must make the best of it. 

Yet though your judgment seems settled, 
it is not wholly futile to seek speech with 
you. You may consciously reject all we 
offer; and yet some single phrase of it 
may linger sub-consciously, to sprout in 
aftertime as the seed of new interpretations; 
and these new interpretations may lead to 
altered convictions. Often the single word, 
though carelessly put forth, acts as a switch- 
lever on the train of thought and carries 
it along new courses to new goals. This 
great living, breathing, complex thing called 
Socialism has its myriad aspects and its 
myriad points of approach. Perhaps even 
now some hitherto unapprehended phase 
of it may arrest your attention and dis- 
quiet your certainty. But whether it does 
or not, we cannot forbear to speak our 
faith in the face of skepticism. 

First, let it be said that we Socialists, 
save for some few sanguine and over-imag- 
inative souls in the ranks, have no utopia, 

[210] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

no glorified plan or process, no Atlantis or 
City of the Sun. Instead, we have an inter- 
pretation of the present and the past, and 
a theory, based upon that interpretation, 
of the future. We are concerned to know 
that certain things have been, that certain 
other things now are, and that according to 
our understanding of the rules of sequence 
certain other things very probably will be. 
We see, or think we see, very plainly at this 
time, certain presages of a collectivist social 
order. We see everywhere an irresistible 
movement toward the concentration of all 
those industries which produce general 
commodities. It does not matter that cer- 
tain small industries, producing highly spe- 
cialized commodities, increase somewhat in 
number. Those industries which supply 
the common needs, and even many of the 
uncommon needs of mankind, are rapidly 
being welded together. The last census 
bulletin of manufactures (1905) shows that 
out of 216,000 factories in the United States, 
1,899, or considerably less than one per 
cent., produce 38 per cent, of the value of 

[211] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

the manufactured product. Against such 
a fact as this, the increase in number of 
certain petty industries has relatively no 
importance. We thus say that production 
becomes all the time more and more social, 
and therefore that it comes to be in greater 
and greater disharmony with the mode of 
ownership, which is individual and con- 
fined to relatively but a small part of the 
population. 

Along with this increase of social produc- 
tion, comes necessarily an increasing organ- 
ization of the workers. The socialization 
of production necessarily socializes the men 
who do the work. Everything which makes 
more efficient and rapid the means of com- 
munication and transportation also brings 
the workers more closely together, and 
makes for a greater homogeneity of their 
instincts and their purposes. Thus with the 
steady growth of this process the workers' 
consciousness of a community of interest 
becomes clearer and clearer to them. Now 
the workers have always felt the burdens 
and the oppressions of their lot; also they 
[212] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

have always felt the weakness of their posi- 
tion. But with this growth of the sense of 
community of interest, with their increasing 
exercise of collective action in trade disputes 
and legislative matters, they come all the 
time to a fuller sense of their powers. First 
their instincts, later their convictions, develop 
in them the ideal of a collective organization 
of society, in which the instruments of pro- 
duction, instead of being owned by a few 
men, and used for the purposes of making 
profit, shall be collective property, owned 
by society as a whole, and operated for the 
purpose of securing an equitable distribu- 
tion. This growing class consciousness of the 
workers, joined with its corollary, an awak- 
ening sense of their powers, promises, we 
say, a reorganization of society. 

This is not all. Capitalism fails to render 
a satisfactory account of its stewardship. 
It has no concern and it makes no provision 
for the well-being of the workers. To the 
feudal baron, the serf was generally a thing 
of intrinsic value, and it was to the interests 
of the baron to see that his serf had food 

[213] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

and comfort. To the slave-holder, too, the 
slave was a thing of intrinsic value, and it 
was to the interests of the slave-holder that 
the slave should be kept in a state of physical 
efficiency. But to the modern capitalist the 
worker is valuable only when he is producing 
profits. The capitalist recognizes no obli- 
gation whatsoever to keep the worker in 
comfort. Under capitalism there are al- 
ways, and must necessarily be, numbers of 
idle workmen, and should one die or be 
maimed or fall sick, there is always another 
to take his place. Divorced from the tools 
of production, the worker in order to make 
a living must compete with his fellows for 
the privilege of using the tools owned by 
other men. Under this competition, his 
wages, unless artificially bettered by the 
action of his union, or in certain cases by 
the action of the state, tend generally to 
keep to a line just about that of the cost of 
maintenance. Year by year the worker 
becomes more conscious of these facts and 
less acquiescent in the continuance of them, 
and so year by year his threat against the 

[214] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

existence of capitalism becomes more men- 
acing. 

Nor is the wage-worker the only member 
of modern society who threatens the exist- 
ence of capitalism. The so-called "middle 
class," composed of those merchants and 
manufacturers who own small establish- 
ments, suffer a constantly increasing press- 
ure through the power of the big concerns. 
In a sense, they read the handwriting on the 
wall. They know that something is the matter 
with them, though they do not know exactly 
what, and they are up in arms against those 
they feel are injuring them. Most of the 
political turmoil of the present time is due 
to the revolt of the "middle class" against 
the magnates. All of the attempts at 
freight-rate regulation, reduction of passen- 
ger rates, the movement for municipal 
ownership and like movements, are expres- 
sions of this "middle-class" revolt rather 
than of a revolt of the workers. The 
"middle-class" men are of course capitalists 
and presumably interested in the mainte- 
nance of capitalism; and yet their constant 

[215] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

assaults on the system as it prevails to-day 
can hardly do else than weaken its position. 

Then, too, the state, urged on by the 
demands of proletarian and farmer and 
"middle-class" man, is constantly assuming 
new functions and modifying and restricting 
the economic methods of individuals. It 
does not, as a rule, do these things sponta- 
neously; it does them long after their need 
has been generally felt, and as a result of a 
pressure that cannot be withstood. The 
state is thus constantly, though haltingly, 
adapting itself to the changes going on in 
the world of industry. 

In all these phenomena Socialists see 
presages of the breakdown of the capitalist 
regime. It has served its purpose, and it 
must fall, as feudalism fell and as slavery 
fell. In some way, possibly by slow and 
hardly perceptible changes, possibly by a 
cataclysm, the existing order will pass to its 
death and a new order will begin. The order 
which will emerge will be Socialism. It will 
be Socialism because of these tendencies, 
and because there will be no alternative. 

[216] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

To Socialists, therefore, the question, 
How against such stupendous forces can 
Socialism possibly win? seems readily an- 
swerable with the statement that Socialism 
is winning all the time. It is winning in at 
least four ways : by the increasing socializa- 
tion of production and distribution; by the 
increasing exercise on the part of the state 
and its subordinate branches of new func- 
tions; by the growth of economic organiza- 
tions of labor, and by the growth of the 
political movement which has for its aim 
the co-operative commonwealth. 

The emergent order, we say, will thus be 
Socialism. Socialism is the collective owner- 
ship and democratic management of the social 
means of production for the common good. 
Not all the means; for it is entirely prob- 
able that many of the smaller industries 
may justly, and with due regard for social 
efficiency, be left in private hands. Socialism 
seeks the perfecting of the industrial plant 
that the product may be vastly increased; 
and it further seeks to distribute that prod- 
uct equitably among all the units that have 

[217] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

contributed in the work. It postulates an 
industrial system in which there is neither 
robbed nor robber as a necessary basis to 
further intellectual and moral progress; for 
though Nature may sporadically develop 
intelligence and morality under a vicious 
industrial order, they are not, to use a figure 
from biology* her normal growths in such 
environment, but her accidents and "sports." 
Socialism seeks, not individual efficiency, the 
sharpening of the claws and beak for war- 
fare, but social efficiency. It does not mean 
the abolition of private property, nor does it 
mean absolute state ownership, or absolute 
parity of pay, or the mandatory allotment of 
tasks, or the creation of a tyrannous bureau- 
cracy, or the death of freedom, or the crush- 
ing of incentive, or the disruption of the 
family. It means an extension, thoroughgo- 
ing and revolutionary, of social control over 
the economic life of the race. It means de- 
mocracy applied to the methods of producing 
goods and of apportioning rewards. It 
means industrial democracy not as an end, 
but as a basis of racial progress. 

[218] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

All very plausible and optimistic, you 
say, but how will it work? We have no 
biograph of the Socialist state, and we do 
not know how it will work. Nor did George 
Washington or Thomas Jefferson know how 
democracy would work in the colonies 
when they carried on their contest against 
Great Britain. As a matter of fact, it 
worked for a time very badly. And so 
for a time may Socialism work very badly. 
But it is to be observed that mankind, when 
it passes over from monarchy to democracy 
and finds the new scheme of things running 
awkwardly, instead of reverting to monarchy 
sets itself the task of perfecting its mechan- 
ism. We may expect the future society 
to do a like thing. We may expect that 
after having toiled so long and sacrificed so 
much in its struggle for a new order, man- 
kind will suffer any momentary ills rather 
than return to the old. Freed from the 
shackles that now hamper its proper growth, 
the progress of society may be expected 
to consist largely in constant attempts at 
adjustment. That process has no con- 

[219] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

ceivable end. The social revolution will 
but furnish the working conditions and the 
principle of action; under those conditions 
and in the light of that principle the process 
can be carried on eternally. 

But must there not then be a powerful 
machine to guide and control this work? 
Very likely there must, and that machine 
is the state. To anarchists, "philosophical 
individualists" and to certain Socialists of 
the " industrial' ' type, the thought is re- 
volting; even to the great magnates the 
thought of a state with other powers than 
those of preserving order and of enforcing 
contracts is disquieting. But the state is, 
in spite of theories. It is an evolution from 
old time, and it waxes stronger through all 
the changes in political forms. To all who 
propose the weakening or elimination of 
the state, there is this reply: the state is 
eternal, and cannot be put aside. Like 
Wordsworth's River Duddon, 

" The form remains, the function never dies." 

It exists out of the necessity of things, and 

[220] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

the more efficient and highly organized the 
industrial system becomes, the greater must 
be the power and efficiency of the state. 

But when we speak of state and govern- 
ment under Socialism, we mean a vastly 
different entity from the thing which is 
called the state to-day. The present-day 
state, while professing to be the organ of 
all society, is, as a matter of fact, an organ 
— not solely, but largely — of the ruling 
class; and what the state determines upon 
doing, and what it decides to be justice, 
are in large part but reflexes of the needs 
and standards of the class of capitalist 
owners, small or large. Under Socialism 
the state would be the embodiment of the 
needs and aims of all society — of a society 
without antagonistic classes. We may look 
to see a Socialist state as the father of num- 
berless institutions of social welfare, the di- 
rector of labor — to a large extent the guide 
in production and the determiner of what 
shall be produced and how. The state 
will determine the range and volume of 
the most needful commodities to be pro- 

[221] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

duced. The workers will be regimented, 
that is, organized; but the regimentation 
will be by their own will and for their own 
purposes. This regimentation, which is so 
frightful a bugbear to the persons who 
clamor for so-called social freedom, will 
be seen to lose half its terrors when it is 
recognized how and to what end it is made. 
It will bear small likeness to the present 
regimentation of the anthracite coal miners 
in Pennsylvania, or to that of the factory 
workers in Massachusetts or Alabama — 
social phenomena to which the defenders 
of the present regime are so wilfully blind. 
Nor will it bear any resemblance to the 
regimentation which Bellamy pictures. It 
will be the regimentation of volunteers as 
against the present regimentation of con- 
scripts. 

Under this system we may expect to see 
administrative bodies, by a statistical study 
of supply and demand, determining what 
is wanted, and by gradations in the hours 
of toil drawing bodies of free workers now 
to this occupation and now to that, and by 

[222] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

the same means withdrawing them from 
occupations that are glutted with help. No 
doubt this expectation argues a mobility 
and a versatility of labor quite unknown 
to-day. And yet even to-day the time lost 
by the workers in forced unemployment 
could be utilized, were capitalism so minded, 
in training an army skilled to work in varied 
industries. Under a system wherein the 
general mobility of labor will be recognized 
as necessary, there will be no difficulty 
in providing it. We may also expect to see 
the state return to the worker an equitable, 
though not necessarily an equal, share of 
the value of the product. The dividend 
to labor is something most likely to be 
determined by general administrative bodies. 
To suppose an economic body rather than 
a political body as the unit of power is to 
suppose anarchy, and a very unjust and 
inequitable anarchy at that. It would mean 
a continuation of the competitive struggle 
for the means of life, more fierce and deadly 
and wasteful than now, because waged 
among groups instead of among individuals. 

[ 223 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

The arbitrament of justice in all its forms 
must lie with the power representing all 
society and not some fraction of it, and that 
power will be political. 

We look, then, to a more concentrated 
form of production, to the elimination of 
the waste of competitive effort, to an ex- 
tension of social service, and we look to 
society in its organized form, the state, as 
the medium by which all this would be 
brought about. Government, under Social- 
ism, would thus be largely the administration 
of the organs of social welfare and of the 
labor forces of the nation. The vast and 
complex structure of institutional machinery 
built up for the defense of property and the 
punishment of the violators of property 
rights, would fade "like an unsubstantial 
pageant." 

But how, you ask with Schaeffle, could 
a democracy effect collective production ? 
Autocracies might do so, as indeed Peru, 
under the Incas, so effectually did. But 
how can 90,000,000 beings of differing 
wills so unify their efforts? Well, so far 

[224] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

as history is concerned, there is no decisive 
evidence for or against the assumption. 
Certainly no democracy has yet attempted 
a systematized operation of its entire in- 
dustrial plant. But what evidence we have 
of democratic assumption of specific enter- 
prises tends to the Socialist conclusion. 
And after all, Schaeffle's objection is purely 
theoretical. It is an instance of what Lord 
Bacon would call the "humor of a scholar." 
His work, it should be remembered, was 
written twenty-six years ago, before any 
of the striking modern experiments in the 
collective operation of industries had been 
made. Everywhere democracy is reaching 
out and assuming an increased control of 
industry. Doubtless the movement is at- 
tended with many mistakes and some fail- 
ures. But the significant thing is, that 
democracy is everywhere so satisfied with 
its present advances that the movement, 
far from halting or retreating, steadily pro- 
gresses. The New Zealand and Australian 
democracies successfully operate many in- 
dustrial enterprises; and a multitude of 

15 [ 225 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

those petty democracies, the municipalities, 
in all countries, are steadily taking over 
new activities. This very democracy — al- 
beit an exceedingly plutocratic one — of the 
United States of America is now operating 
in its navy yards, in the reclamation service 
and in the Canal Zone, enterprises which 
Schaeffle would have denied it the possibility 
of conducting. It builds ships, it builds and 
operates mills for the manufacture of con- 
crete, and in Panama it digs a gigantic 
canal, it runs a railroad and a steamship 
line and it efficiently furnishes a community 
of more than 50,000 souls with almost 
every needful comfort. The denial of the 
power of democracies to manage their 
economic affairs is merely a survival from 
a past age of a prejudice that denied to 
democracies the capacity to manage their 
political affairs. 

Well, then, assuming for the time dem- 
ocracies to be thus capable, there is the 
unsolvable problem of recompense. How 
can a community endure if the basis of 
recompense is merely need; and if the basis 

[226] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

is service, how can recompense be rightly 
apportioned, and what shall be done with 
the needy? We do not have to solve the 
problem in theory, for it is one of those 
problems that will be adjusted by the 
pressure of necessity, with small regard for 
theories. Still, there are two radically dif- 
fering ideals regarding recompense widely 
held; and it may be well to consider them. 
One is the ideal of rewards on the basis of 
needs, and one is the ideal of rewards based 
on service. The former may be called a 
Communist ideal, the latter an Individual- 
ist-Socialist ideal. It is not to be denied 
that each ideal, and furthermore, every 
possible gradation between these two ex- 
tremes, are held by different men who call 
themselves, and rightly, Socialists. But 
there is, after all, a norm of these varying 
beliefs or ideals. The opinion may be 
hazarded that most Socialists all over the 
world believe that need as a sole basis of 
rewards is a standard utterly impracticable 
among men as we now know them. So long 
has mankind been prompted to its tasks 

[227] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

by the desire for individual gain that this 
motive is for the time ingrained; and a 
division of products proportioned to needs 
without reference to service would be re- 
jected by every community on the planet. 

But this ideal, though acknowledged to 
be impracticable of fulfillment in the near 
future, is one which is generally held to be 
possible of ultimate fulfillment. Socialists 
hold, then, that the matter of rewards shall 
be determined by the class which has most 
right to a voice in the matter — the produc- 
ing class — and that the basis shall be that 
which does most to insure the efficiency 
and well-being of society. Mankind has 
been trained for countless generations to 
hope for a reward proportioned to service. 
It has never got a reward so proportioned, 
as all know, and it never will get it under 
competitive industry. But this hope has 
been implanted in it, and this standard, 
though everywhere violated, is for the time 
fixed in the human consciousness. And so 
this standard will most likely be adopted 
under Socialism. But it is one which must 

[228] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

suffer a constant and increasing modification 
by that other standard of need. With what 
face can any upholder of the present regime 
criticise the growing recognition of this 
standard? It is one which every humane 
man adopts in his own family; and it is 
one to which society itself pays greater 
heed year by year. The modern state, 
capitalistic though it is, in many ways 
foreshadows the state which is to follow it. 
Our asylums for the blind, the deaf and 
the dumb, and for defectives of various 
kinds; our hospitals, our schools even, are 
all instances of a distribution of benefits 
based solely upon needs, and they are all 
of them anticipations of a state in which 
this principle will be carried to degrees 
unapprehended to-day. 

But there is more to this pay problem, 
you say; will there be uniform labor time 
and equal recompense, hour for hour ? 
Who can say? And yet the answer may 
be made that parity of pay is no necessary 
part of Socialist doctrine. It would seem 
quite likely that a Socialist society would 

[229] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

pay unequally for different kinds of work. 
Inequality of recompense is another of those 
customs to which mankind has become 
habituated through generations of expe- 
rience, and one which will take years to 
outgrow. But if it is asked how unequal 
these rewards are to be, one can say with 
confidence that they will show no such 
disparity as is shown in the commercial 
world to-day; and with almost equal con- 
fidence that they will not show even the 
moderate disparities which are found in the 
departments at Washington, wherein some 
dim approaches to an ethical standard are 
made, and where the range of recompense 
between that for a clerk and that for a 
cabinet minister is not more than from 1 to 
7, or from $1,200 to $8,000. Money re- 
wards are not the only rewards for which 
men strive, even under a regime wherein 
the size of this reward is exalted into a 
standard of social worth. 

But, you say, no men of ability will work 
for mean pay; and if Socialism wants to 
bring out the best talents of inventor, ad- 

[230] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

ministrator and even laborer, material re- 
wards must be proportional, and the recom- 
pense of the highest ability must be vastly 
greater than that of common labor. Then, 
too, you say, this brings up another problem. 
For this proportionate remuneration is 
totally incompatible with democratic equal- 
ity. With this proportionate reward, there- 
fore, we cannot have equality, and without 
it we cannot have adequate production. 

Not so fast and sweeping, Mr. Doubter. 
Your first alternative is an error. There 
is no necessary inconsistency between mod- 
erate inequality of possessions and equality 
of social and political rights and status. 
Any one familiar with life in those new com- 
munities wherein differences of economic 
function, and consequently classes, have so 
far not arisen, is aware of this truth. The 
settlers of the Middle and the Far West 
were men and women of very great degree 
of difference in possessions. Many went 
West with sufficient means to acquire large 
holdings of land, while others were virtually 
penniless. Yet for a long time in these 

[231] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

communities social equality was an assured 
fact. To a very considerable extent it is 
even yet so. Only after economic processes 
had settled down, and differences of eco- 
nomic function had become marked and 
enduring — some persons becoming large 
owners of the means of production and 
others becoming mere sellers of labor power 
— did social equality begin to decline. It 
is certain — if anything can be certain — that 
in a social republic wherein economic classes 
have been abolished, and wherein the pres- 
ent stigma attaching to the performance of 
manual work is no longer known, very 
considerable differences of possession may 
harmonize with perfect social equality. So- 
cial inequalities are a result, not so much of 
disparities of fortune, as of disparities of 
economic function. 

Your other alternative involves the ques- 
tion of incentive. Here of course is ground 
that is debatable, and that will always 
be debated until an overwhelming mass 
of proof is given by long experimentation 
with facts. Men will not give their best 

[232] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

labors, you say, unless promised a material 
reward proportioned to their service. And 
yet it is certain that three-fifths of mankind 
to-day are constantly toiling with no rational 
ground for believing that they will ever 
be so rewarded. But, you say, with Mal- 
lock, these are the common mob, who are 
lashed to their work by the whip of neces- 
sity. It is the intellectual aristocracy, the 
inventors, the managers, the administrators, 
the men who plan and carry forward enter- 
prises of great pith and moment, who must 
be rewarded generously in order to bring 
out what is best in them. 

Certainly these men must be rewarded. 
So should all other men be rewarded in order 
to bring out what is best in them. And 
that the amount of this reward should 
be determined with some reference to the 
relative amount of service rendered, may 
also be cheerfully conceded. But what 
standard of reward-value shall be used? 
Is it necessary that it should be a money 
standard exclusively ? 

History and descriptive sociology give an 

[333] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

emphatic denial to any such contention. 
In all societies, in all ages, men seek their 
rewards according to the current standards 
of valuation. The Indian youth, who is 
forbidden to marry or to sit in the councils 
of the warriors until he has lifted the hair 
of a certain number of victims, takes his 
reward in scalps. His best powers of cun- 
ning and strategy, bravery and endurance 
are brought out and kept employed in the 
tasks which promise this reward. In the 
age of chivalry men take their reward in 
their records of victories in tournaments 
or on the field of battle. In ages dominated 
by regard for learning or the arts men seek 
rewards in intellectual or artistic achieve- 
ment; in ages dominated by religious fer- 
vor men take their rewards in a conscious- 
ness of exceptional piety, or at least in a 
reputation for it. It is only in a commercial 
age that men insist upon a proportional 
reward in money. And even in such ages 
this standard is by no means unexceptional. 
In this very time, when all the world seems 
given up to a mad scramble for material 

[234] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

gain, the best men, the most useful men, 
give their lives to services that promise 
only a mean and scanty, if any, material 
reward. They are taking their larger pay 
in another coin. It is an unimaginative 
criticism of the Socialist state to assert 
that when great material rewards have 
been abolished, natural ability will content 
itself with common tasks, refusing to exert 
itself in tasks of invention and direction. 
Nothing is so false to history, so false to 
human nature. Ability always seeks to 
manifest itself, and generally it asks no 
other reward than "going wages." The 
consciousness of achievement, the esteem 
of one's fellows, the pride of sharing in 
leadership, will draw from the men of ability 
a quantity and character of performance 
which even the hope of material gain cannot 
bring forth to-day. 

Well, you reply, this may possibly be 
true for the exceptional man, but it is cer- 
tainly not true for the average man. Noth- 
ing but the grind of personal need will hold 
him to his task. Most men are indolent by 

[235] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

nature. Socialism is the lazy man's utopia 
— a leafy and flowery paradise wherein he 
may lie down and "take the count." 

Truly a whimsical view to take of a world 
of such momentous energy, in the face of the 
eternal striving and achieving of myriads 
of men! And a yet more whimsical view 
of the industrious man's ideal of a common- 
sense arrangement of his economic relations ! 
In the light of all that has been achieved on 
this planet in the brief period of man's his- 
tory, are we not rather justified in assuming 
that all men have the impulse to exertion ? 
They do, indeed, seek to avoid disagreeable 
work. They seek to avoid work which is 
socially contemned — work the performance 
of which places them in an inferior class. 
And they seek to avoid dangerous work 
and monotonous work and meanly paid 
work — work which drains them of health 
and joy for no adequate return. There is 
no sweated seamstress or factory spool- 
tender, no stoker, or miner or street-sweeper 
who would not prefer to be idle rather than 
to work at his or her daily task. And yet 

[236] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

probably there are very few of these per- 
sons but would work willingly and energeti- 
cally at the making of things in which they 
could enshrine something of their heart 
and soul. 

They have not now the opportunity. 
Only the more fortunate workers, as indus- 
try is now constituted, are enabled to do 
the kind of work which they most wish to 
do or are best capable of doing. As boys 
or girls we are started in certain occupations, 
not because we have an instinctive inclina- 
tion toward them, but because opportunities 
therein are open. The "grind of personal 
need," far from impelling us to do the best 
labor, compels us to do the kind of labor 
for which there is a demand and which 
is nearest to us. No one with an instinct 
of workmanship cares to be employed in 
the making of shoddy clothing, or collapsible 
furniture, or imitation food or Buddensiek 
buildings. Yet under the present organiza- 
tion of society there is a demand for these 
commodities, and men must work upon 
them. Look over a list of common occupa- 

[237] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

tions, and note how many of them are 
carried on in dirt or filth, note in how many 
is the ever-present danger of infection or 
maiming or death, how many are crushingly 
monotonous, how many are wholly wanting 
in any possibility of self-expression, how 
many are meanly paid and how many 
are socially contemned. Look these over 
and consider them, and you will find a 
truer cause for the wish to escape work 
than in native indolence. 

We may reasonably expect, under Social- 
ism, a better mechanism for fitting the work 
to the man and the man to the work. We 
may expect freer opportunities for the work- 
er to find the task he can best perform. 
Under Socialism each unit is a part owner 
in the whole industrial plant of the nation. 
W T e can hardly suppose that under such 
circumstances there will be any production 
of fraudulent commodities, for people do not 
make such commodities for themselves. We 
can hardly suppose that people will delib- 
erately set themselves to dangerous tasks 
when those tasks can be made safe, or to 

[238] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

disagreeable tasks that can be made agree- 
able, or to monotonous tasks the monotony 
of which can be relieved. Nor can we sup- 
pose that in a society where all are useful 
workers, a social stigma will attach to any 
kind of useful work. There would still 
be disagreeable tasks to do — that is, tasks 
disagreeable in themselves; and yet men 
would perform them, as many men do 
many such tasks to-day, willingly and 
proudly. Who more than the physician is 
called upon to do tasks of sometimes re- 
volting disagreeableness ? But honor at- 
taches to his work, and goodly recompense 
follows it, and he does it with zealous pride. 
The task disagreeable in itself is thus 
made, if not always agreeable, at least 
tolerable, by the bonus of honor or pay. 
It is an old rule — older than Nineveh or 
Karnak; and the business of a Socialist 
society will be to apply it to all men and to 
all occupations instead of to a few. Nothing 
seems theoretically simpler than to create, 
by gradations in honor and worktime and 
pay, a uniform agreeability or tolerability of 

[239] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

tasks ; and though theories sometimes main- 
tain a stubborn nonconformist attitude in 
the presence of practice, this one may stand 
as sustained by every application so far 
made of it. The agreeable task is weighted; 
the disagreeable task lightened, the task 
at which no one will work at a wage which 
society can afford to pay will cease to be 
done or be done by machinery. Even to- 
day vast categories of repulsive tasks would 
pass over to the domain of machinery were 
it not that capital finds more profit in the 
exploitation of the most wretched part of 
the population. With greater freedom of 
opportunity, with more attractive tasks, 
with juster recompense, with an equal inter- 
est on the part of every one in the sum of 
production, you need have no fear that men 
will not work. 

Nor need you fear that the basic motive 
of personal need will be removed. It will 
not. He that can work and will not, shall 
not eat. The primary motive of personal 
need will always be present. But there is 
another motive which usually shares with 

[240] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

it in exertion, and would always do so under 
freer conditions of labor. That is the joy 
of achievement. It has two aspects — or 
rather two manifestations — the one of im- 
mediate satisfaction in creating something 
and the other of winning the regard of our 
fellows. There is no normal being who does 
not — or who would not, under reasonable 
conditions — take pride in the work of his 
head or hand. Nor, except in the stress 
of fratricidal struggle, is there one who does 
not seek expression in fellow-service. Even 
under the present regime, when the test 
of a man's success is so commonly held 
to be the amount of money he can amass, 
thousands of men give over their chance 
of winning pecuniary rewards in order to 
devote themselves to a social ideal. We 
see this in the labor and social movements 
of all countries, in the revolutionary move- 
ment in Russia, the co-operative movement 
in England and Belgium, and often in 
government service. An impulse like this, 
appearing even under the unfavorable con- 
ditions of the present regime, could not but 

16 [ 241 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

flower under Socialism — under a system 
wherein the common good rather than the 
individual good would be the accepted ideal. 
The common man is made of the same clay 
as is the exceptional man; though his facul- 
ties are less intense, and his skill is less 
plastic, his nature is the same; and it needs 
only the humanizing of the conditions of 
his employment to cause him to give to his 
simple tasks like energies and impulses. 

And how about production in the mass? 
Granted, for the moment, that men would 
work under this visionary scheme of things, 
how much would they work and with what 
result? For surely the sum of production 
must be greater than now if the increased 
comforts promised by the Socialist leaders 
are to flow to all. With the present stimuli 
to exertion in large part removed, would 
the new stimuli more than make up the 
deficit? Look at the clerks in our public 
offices. Are these a sample of what we 
may expect under the co-operative com- 
monwealth ? 

You skeptics and doubters make over- 
1 242 ] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

much of this matter, do you not? To 
many of you it has become the last refuge 
after all your other positions have been 
driven in. We Socialists, on the other hand, 
find it exceedingly difficult to regard the 
problem seriously. For, in the first place, 
processes already at work indicate the 
means of a vast augmentation of production. 
The trust, in its anticipation of the Socialist 
state, steadily points the way. The material 
power of production is increasing enormously 
all the time. Work is being concentrated 
in the larger and better factories, improved 
methods are being introduced, competition 
and the duplication of products are being 
curtailed, and waste is to some extent 
being eliminated. Who can say to what 
ends these processes may not be carried 
when the motive that governs will be the 
common good rather than the advantage 
of a few ? When not merely such improved 
processes as happen to be immediately 
profitable to particular interests, but all 
possible improved processes, are introduced ; 
when not merely a few, but all, of the com- 

[243] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

petitive wastes are abolished; when the 
production of fraudulent and luxurious and 
useless commodities is discontinued, and 
production is carried on with an eye single to 
the needs of mankind ? 

You draw an erroneous analogy between 
co-operative workers under Socialism and 
municipal and state and federal employes 
under capitalism. No doubt many of the 
latter are lazy and inefficient, and some 
of them are dishonest. Though public ser- 
vants, they are a product of the competitive 
strife for personal advantage, and they are 
governed, as a rule, by its standards; they 
get their appointments largely as political 
favors; and even when appointed through 
the civil service examinations, there is little 
or nothing to cause them to look upon pub- 
lic service as different from private service. 
As a rule, the conditions about them cause 
them to see in government just what a 
franchise-grabber or a contractor or a dealer 
sees in it — an alien organization out of 
which they can extract something of advan- 
tage to themselves. Yet though this is a 

[244] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

rule, it has its notable exceptions; for a 
high sense of social service is not infre- 
quently found among public employes. 
And that such a sense should develop in any 
case under the conditions is a happy augury 
for Socialism — a promise of the spirit that 
will govern men when partnership in pos- 
session creates in all of them a sense of 
social obligation. 

Do you stop to consider, when nursing 
your apprehension of a Socialist lack of 
production, the prevalent idleness of mil- 
lions of men ? They are willing to produce 
wealth if only the opportunity is given them. 
But capitalism will not and cannot assume 
the task of providing them the opportunity. 
The yearly loss in the volume of production 
due to unemployment is enormous. The 
census figures for 1900 show that 3,177,753 
persons were idle for from 1 to 3 months, 
2,554,925 for from 4 to 6 months, and 
736,286 for from 7 to 12 months. This 
frightful total of 6,468,964 persons is some- 
what more than one-fifth of the total of 
gainfully occupied persons for that year. 

[ 245 ] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

Under a rational system of industry each 
of these persons might have produced four 
or five times the value of his maintenance. 
Socialism would guarantee opportunities 
for work for everybody. The Socialist ad- 
ministration that could not keep that pledge 
would be compelled to give way to another 
that could. Would not setting these millions 
to work increase the sum of production ? 

Is it not also to be supposed that men will 
produce in greater volume and in better 
value when the products are their own than 
when the products are another's? Is it 
not, in the words of the Rev. Franklin M. 
Sprague, "inherently probable that pro- 
duction would be vastly greater when men 
assisted and encouraged each other than 
when they opposed each other?" With 
improved conditions in the work-places, 
with greater immunity from wounds and 
infection, with better nourishment, sturdier 
health, a greater satisfaction with life and 
a higher hope for the future, is the belief 
altogether visionary that the workers would 
do more and better work? Is it quite 
[246] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

visionary, either, to believe that in the 
removal of the social stigma from toil; in 
the elimination of the cause for the work- 
man's sense of indignity and wrong in the 
forcible taking of the products of his toil ; 
in the mutual watchfulness, mutual criti- 
cism and mutual emulation inseparable 
from co-operative labor and in the spontane- 
ous growth of standards of social usefulness 
and devotion — that in and under this con- 
dition men will strive more earnestly and 
fruitfully than they do to-day? It is not 
a visionary belief. It is a logical expecta- 
tion. 

There is another objection which you 
men of little faith bring against Socialism. 
That is, that the Socialist promise of an 
abolition of the wage- system and of the 
exploitation of labor cannot be fulfilled. 
Socialism does indeed promise the aboli- 
tion of wages and the system under which 
they are paid; but it does not promise an 
abolition of payments for work done. The 
word "wages" has to Socialists a meaning 
specifically related to capitalism; wages are 

[247] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

that fraction of the value produced by the 
worker which is left in his possession after 
the machine-owner has taken what he can 
for the use of his machine. Unfortunately, 
there is no word to designate what Social- 
ists mean by the individual worker's recom- 
pense under Socialism. It might be called 
a quota or a share or a labor-dividend. It 
is, in fact, a dividend of the joint product 
of all labor, less the necessary cost of ad- 
ministration. Very likely, payments will be 
made as wages are now paid; but though 
the form will be similar, the substance will 
be entirely different. 

Socialism does indeed also promise the 
definite ending of the exploitation of labor; 
but the promise does not mean that 
the worker will get for his individual use 
the full product of his toil. The setting 
apart of wealth for the production of new 
wealth, the costs of administration, and the 
costs of all those social services to which 
civilized mankind is becoming accustomedj 
will subtract from this dividend. But this 
subtraction is not exploitation. In the na- 

[248] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

tion's collective capital, if we may use that 
term for a thing so different from what we 
know as capital to-day, the workers will 
be equal partners; and they will be equal 
sharers in all those benefits which flow from 
the institutions and social services which 
mankind has gradually developed. In other 
words, the share of the product that is to- 
day withheld from the workers by the charge 
which capital makes for itself, is an ex- 
ploitation by private persons for their own 
benefit; what is withheld from the workers 
under Socialism is an addition to the com- 
mon wealth, in which every human being 
is an equal sharer. 

And now a brief word for liberty. To 
hear you speak of it as you sometimes do, 
one might suppose that all men now had 
this blessing, and that certain persons known 
as Socialists proposed to take it away from 
them. Who in truth has it now? Pos- 
sibly, in Falstaff's words, "he that died o' 
Wednesday"; for certainly no other has 
it — not even Mr. Rockefeller or Nicholas II. 
or Mr. Roosevelt. There is not a single 

[249] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

industrial act of any individual nor even an 
expression of opinion, that is not conditioned 
and bound by many factors. This un- 
attainable abstraction has been differently 
defined by every generation of men. The 
generation in which Socialist thought has 
permeated every branch of learning dis- 
misses as illusory the medieval notion — 
though still held by anarchists and orthodox 
economists — of liberty as the absence of 
governmental restraint. Liberty so defined 
is a negation. Real liberty, in the words 
of T. H. Green, is a "positive power or 
capacity" which each man exercises or holds 
"through the help or security given him 
by his fellow-men, and which he in turn 
helps to secure for them." The legal liberty 
to do things which economic conditions 
absolutely prohibit gives a word of promise 
to the ear only to break it to the hope. It 
is a liberty in phrase, but a subjection in 
substance. The liberty for which men now 
strive is a mutually exercised and mutually 
restrained power to do. You speak of the 
Socialists as though they were deliberately 

[250] 



SKEPTICS AND DOUBTERS 

forging shackles for their own limbs. Why, 
these men and women love liberty as much 
as you do. But they have learned the 
hollowness of the medieval notion of liberty, 
and in its stead they have conceived a notion 
of liberty as a power for social achieve- 
ment. The ordered restraints of Socialism 
will endow mankind with a liberty which it 
has never before known. 

In these brief considerations, imperfectly 
set forth, there may be little or nothing to 
shake your skepticism, or to awaken a 
willingness to reopen your inquiry. If so, 
so be it. Yet in spite of doubt and hesitancy 
and antagonism, the mighty phenomenon 
that in the end will resolve all doubts is 
every day more evident. That is the inter- 
national Socialist movement. It is idle to 
say that for this or that theoretical reason 
Socialism is impracticable, just as a hundred 
and fifty years ago it was idle to say that 
democracy was impracticable. Socialism, in 
its practical form, is a world-wide move- 
ment for industrial democracy; in other 
words, it is a carrying forward of that 

[251] 



SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS 

movement which during the last century 
transferred political power from kings and 
nobles to elected representatives of the 
people — a carrying forward of that move- 
ment to the realm of industry. Doubtless 
this movement has made many mistakes, 
doubtless its leaders have made wrong 
postulates, wrong deductions from particu- 
lar sets of facts. But the movement itself, 
in spite of blunders and defeats, goes on 
toward its goal. The certainty of its ulti- 
mate triumph lies in the inexorable processes 
of economic evolution, and in the will of 
man, which though shaped and directed 
by its material environment, yet constantly 
reacts upon that environment and molds it 
to the shape of the ideal. 



252] 



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AS ARTIST-PHILOSOPHER 

by RENEE M. DEACON 

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Portrait frontispiece by the author. A new book by 
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Waste of Ability and Inflation of Its Prices by 

the Rich. 
Artificial Rent of Ability. 
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The Woman at the Gate 

To Prison While the Sun Shines 

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Filling the War Chest 

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At a Street Corner 

The Crank of All Ages 

Patrolling the Gutter 

The Black Spot of the Constituency 

"Votes for Women — Forward!" 

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